Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Jul 27, 2019 1:24 pm

Yes, 'Send Her Back' Is the Face of Evil—I Know Fascism When I See It

| Opinion
Jason Stanley
On 7/19/19 at 1:40 PM EDT
"All effective propaganda must be confined to very few points," Adolf Hitler wrote, "which must be brought out in the form of slogans."

"Drain the swamp." "Lock her up." "Build the wall." These are the slogans that former Trump campaign adviser Steve Bannon said won the election in 2016. On Wednesday, at a Trump rally in Greenville, North Carolina, a horrifying new one emerged: "Send her back."

As I've said, it takes a lot to shock me. This chant, however, directly invokes an ideology that I know well, one that connects citizenship to a mythical ethnic or national essence, and demands unquestioning fealty to its leader and symbols. It's called fascism. That's why I stated that what we saw in Greenville is the face of evil, and now I'll explain.

My father was born in Berlin in 1932. Germany's leader, Adolf Hitler, had come to power using shocking rhetoric about my father's religion: The Jews, he said, were not really German, a fifth column of traitors who maligned the country's traditions and character. Their ultimate aim was a communist takeover, he claimed, and Jewish loyalty was not to Germany but rather to international Jewry.

In September 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Germany's new citizenship laws did not merely focus on its Jewish population, however. Hitler was obsessed with what he regarded as Germany's lax immigration and citizenship laws. The Nuremberg Laws also excluded those considered not "of German or kindred blood" from German citizenship.

National Socialism, the political doctrine of the Nazi Party, is an extreme case of an ideology, fascism, that defines a country's identity negatively, via the vilification of immigrants and ethnic or religious minorities. Loyalty to a specific ethnic or national identity is the highest value. Supporters view the leader of the nation to be a sacred embodiment of this identity—thus, criticism of the leader is a form of treason.

In his 1947 book, The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer described fascist propaganda as "the language of mass fanaticism." Nazi rallies were characterized by ritualistic chanting.

Now, citizenship, immigration and loyalty to nation are once again major themes of a political movement—this time in the United States.

As president, Donald Trump has focused on restricting immigration and deporting undocumented residents. He has railed against supposedly lax immigration laws and birthright citizenship. And he has begun his re-election campaign with these themes, taking four non-white Democratic congresswomen as his main targets.

In a tweet this past Sunday, the president suggested that Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." In subsequent tweets, he described them as "Anti-America" and "pro-terrorist," with a mission to transform the United States into a "Socialist or Communist Country."

He has taken particular aim at Omar, a Muslim congresswoman from Minnesota who arrived as a refugee from Somalia in childhood.

To some Americans, their fellow citizens of Muslim faith are a fifth column in the United States, whose loyalty is to their fellow Muslims rather than their country. As we saw with conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama, this view is often attached to allegations of a secret Muslim plot to bring socialism to our shores. As a Muslim leftist, Omar is a tempting target for a president who has relentlessly targeted immigration by this religious minority in his rhetoric and policies.

The chants of "Send her back" in North Carolina reflect the belief that Omar's political opposition is not legitimate because it is a reflection of the subversive nature of Muslim immigrants.

It is absurd to conceive of America fundamentally as a place where a group of people with a shared ethnic, linguistic and religious past reside. America is more coherently thought of as a set of political ideals that unify Americans in a collective effort to realize them. Chief among these ideals is freedom, particularly political freedom. The American project involves criticizing our past and our present, in an effort to realize our American values over time—a commitment to this project, not a shared religion or race, is what binds us together.

It is scarcely possible to engage in the American project by replacing political freedom with unquestioning loyalty. Robust political criticism of our past and present is thus a fundamentally American practice. Threatening to strip citizenship from political opponents for engaging in it is fundamentally un-American. The suggestion that this step is justified because these opponents are immigrants or religious minorities is even more so, as freedom includes religious freedom.

Donald Trump Greenville Rally
President Donald Trump speaks at a rally on July 17 in Greenville, North Carolina, during which the crowd chanted, "Send her back." Zach Gibson/Getty
My father arrived in the United States as a refugee from Nazi Germany in August 1939; my mother, having survived the Holocaust in a Siberian labor camp, arrived in 1948. Their first glimpses of their new homes were from the deck of boats sailing into New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty.

Both my parents were haunted for decades by the slogans and chants they heard on the streets of Germany.

Both took comfort in the fact that America is a country defined by political ideals flatly inconsistent with the vilification of a religious minority.

No political party in the United States today can be justifiably compared with the National Socialists. But the Republican Party, under the leadership of Trump, is seeking to retain political power by borrowing crucial elements of its ideology and tactics. All patriotic Americans should be aghast.

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University. His latest book is How Fascism Works.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jul 29, 2019 6:47 am


Immigration Officials Snatch 9-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Heading To School, Hold Her For 2 Days


“I was scared. I was completely by myself,” says sobbing fourth-grader.
headshot
By Mary Papenfuss


A 9-year-old American citizen on her way to school was apprehended by U.S. immigration officials and detained for some 32 hours before she was released back to her family. Federal officials said later that the girl, who was carrying a U.S. passport card with her, gave “inconsistent information.”

“I was scared. I didn’t have my mom or my brother. I was completely by myself,” Julia Isabel Amparo Medina told NBC-7 TV in San Diego.

Medina, her 14-year-old brother and two friends were being driven to school by the friends’ mom from their home in Tijuana to San Ysidro last Monday. Thousands of people travel through the Tijuana-San Ysidro crossing daily for school or work.

When traffic slowed to a crawl, the mom told the children to walk across the border so they wouldn’t be late. An official detained Medina, saying she didn’t look like the photo on her passport card.

They finally released her Tuesday evening about 32 hours later. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the girl, whom they confirmed is an American citizen, “provided inconsistent information during her inspection,” which they didn’t elaborate. She was taken into custody so officers could “perform due diligence in confirming her identity and citizenship,” according to the statement.

Officials had no explanation for why the process took 32 hours or why the 9-year-old was in custody the entire time.

Medina’s brother, who is also a U.S. citizen, said officials initially accused him of human trafficking and demanded he sign a paper saying that his sister was really his cousin.

“He was told that he would be taken to jail and they were going to charge him for human trafficking and sex trafficking,” Julia’s mom, Thelma Galaxia, told NBC.

Immigration agents’ shocking actions against citizens are being challenged in an ACLU lawsuit filed last month against CPB on behalf of two American women. They were stopped in a store in their Montana town by an immigration official because they were speaking Spanish. Both women were born in the U.S. As the agent demanded their identification, one of the women videotaped the encounter on her phone.

“Ma’am the reason I asked you for your ID is I came in here and I saw you guys are speaking Spanish, which is very unheard of up here,” the agent said on camera. The ACLU is arguing the agent had no probable cause to detain the women.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/julia-is ... mg00000004



Donald Trump suffers hilarious Twitter malfunction

There’s nothing funny about a racist traitor who’s illegitimately occupying the Oval Office while holding immigrant children hostage in concentration camps. Donald Trump is a joke, just the worst kind of unfunny joke. That said, because Trump is such an inept bumbler, he periodically does idiotic things that give us a moment of cathartic laughter – such as what he just tweeted.

Donald Trump was apparently watching Fox News tonight while former ICE official Thomas Homan was saying ridiculous things. Trump tweeted this Homan quote: “If the Democrats would have closed the Loopholes two years ago when President Trump asked them to do so, none of this stuff would have happened.” Then Trump attributed the quote to @ThomasHomanICE which is a parody account that says “satire” right in the bio. Oops. Then it got worse.

We’d have expected Trump to quickly delete this errant tweet. But instead, four minutes later he tweeted another quote from Thomas Homan, and attributed it to the @ThomasHomanICE parody account again. By this time the account, which had been dormant for two years, sprang to life and began posting links to make donations to help immigrants fight back against Trump and ICE.

Donald Trump is now so far gone, he’s accidentally tweeting links to a clearly-marked parody account that’s now being used to raise money to fight back against him. Trump long ago ran off all the people in his administration who were even fractionally competent. There’s clearly no one left to tell him to delete these Twitter malfunctions, so he’s stuck with the humiliation. You can find the immigrant defense fund donation link here.
https://www.immigrantdefenseproject.org/donate/


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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 01, 2019 3:12 pm

Hacked Emails Show GOP Demands on Border Security Were Crafted by Industry Lobbyists
Lee Fang
August 1 2019, 10:42 a.m.
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann often strikes a Trumpian tone on border security, stoking fears during television appearances and on social media about a caravan of Central American migrants, and repeating the president’s pledge to build a wall to prevent unauthorized immigration.

In April 2018, during an appropriations committee hearing, the Tennessee Republican took a more subdued and technical approach to immigration issues when quizzing then-Customs and Border Protection chief Kevin McAleenan. Fleischmann, looking down to read from a paper in front of him, wanted to know if McAleenan was on schedule to implement an upgrade of license plate reader technology at the border, as mandated by a previous appropriations bill.

McAleenan thanked the committee for its support and pledged continued work to upgrade LPR technology along the border.

A few days after the exchange, a lobbyist representing Perceptics, a tech company that sold state-of-the-art LPR cameras and technology to the government, emailed her team to confirm that Fleischmann had “asked about CBP’s plan to modernize its LPRs as we asked his office to do,” along with a link to a video clip of the hearing.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 25: The House Appropriations Committee's Homeland Security Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) questions Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Matt Albence during a hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill July 25, 2019 in Washington, DC. Albence testified that the increase in the number of people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has stretched his agency's budget to the breaking point. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) questions Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Matt Albence during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 25, 2019.
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The lobbyist’s email, along with several others in a cache of thousands of hacked documents from Perceptics dumped on the dark web in June, reveal that Fleischmann’s question — and the congressional demand that the agency spend millions of dollars to upgrade the cameras used to automatically read and identify license plates — had been orchestrated in part by a company that hoped to profit from the decision. Fleischmann’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The War on Immigrants
Read Our Complete CoverageThe War on Immigrants

Following the hack, the CBP suspended its contract with Perceptics. But the emails provide a rare inside view of how the border security industry plays a quiet role in shaping immigration policy — and, in this case, how private contractors maneuvered to benefit from heated debate over President Donald Trump’s border wall.

In 2017, Trump announced that he would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which provides legal protections for undocumented youth, also known as “Dreamers” — and demanded that protections only be restored in exchange for funds to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The following year, GOP lawmakers attempted to hammer out a compromise that would enshrine rights for Dreamers while providing funds for Trump’s border security demands.

Congressional Republicans split into two camps. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., sponsored the more conservative faction’s bill, Securing America’s Future Act, which provided $38 billion in border security, including funds for the wall, and a provision to allow Dreamers to reapply for legal status every three years. Moderate Republicans, led by Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., and Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., presented the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act, which provided a permanent pathway to legal status for Dreamers and $25 billion in border security measures, including funds for a border wall.

As lawmakers debated these proposals, lobbyists from Perceptics were at work finding congressional sponsors to seed both nascent border security bills with dedicated funding for border security agencies to continue buying and upgrading LPR technology.

The emails provide a rare inside view of how the border security industry plays a quiet role in shaping immigration policy.

In June 2018, Lucia Alonzo, chief of staff to Ferox Strategies, an outside lobbying firm to Perceptics, wrote to her client to inform them that then-House Speaker Paul Ryan had planned votes on two competing immigration bills. “We have obtained a leaked copy of the new ‘compromise’ immigration bill under development in the House,” she wrote. The compromise bill, as well as a rival conservative alternative from Goodlatte, the lobbyist noted, included provisions that Perceptics had pushed to lawmakers to boost funding for its products.

“In summary,” Alonzo continued, “we have ensured that BOTH of the immigration bills headed for votes in the House authorize $125 million for LPR modernization, adding more weight and urgency to our request for appropriations funding LPR modernization.”

The LPR provisions were among many provisions calling for spending on security measures well beyond the wall. Both bills also called for the funding of unmanned aerial vehicles to patrol the border, tower-based security technology, radars, detention facilities, and an array of biometric technology to identify and track undocumented migrants, including DNA testing.

While dozens of private security firms and trade groups lobbied on the immigration proposals, there is little public information on whether the lobbyists directly authored the bills.

Perceptics’ hacked emails, however, show a clear fingerprint. The legislative texts of both House bills include nearly identical language on LPR funding. The drafts also codify a pilot program in Laredo, Texas, to use the technology on high-volume tractor-trailer ports of entry.

Both bills ultimately failed as conservatives rallied against the compromise legislation put forward by moderates, and Democrats and moderates killed the conservative border bill.

But the lobbyists continued to press for further opportunities.

Related
Before Being Hacked, Border Surveillance Firm Lobbied to Downplay Security and Privacy Concerns About Its Technology
In a follow-up email just before the Thanksgiving holiday last year, Alonzo sent talking points in support of the $125 million in provisions to Fleischmann’s congressional staff. “As we head toward a final FY 2019 funding package, I did want to send a quick refresher on Perceptics and our asks for your reference,” she wrote, thanking Fleischmann’s team for its support and going on to explain the need for automated tractor-trailer processing and LPR upgrades. Perceptics’ cameras along the borders, Alonzo noted, were 10 years old and required replacement.

The provisions, Alonzo added, were broad and would not guarantee an exclusive contract for Perceptics over another LPR vendor. Still, the language provided many opportunities for the company to build its revenue. Automating cargo processing at ports of entry, like the test project at Laredo, would cost another $175 million, but would result in savings from reduced man-hours and wait times at the border, Alonzo told Fleischmann’s office.

In the Senate, GOP leadership rallied behind similar legislation to revamp and finance an array of border security and detention facilities. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced two major immigration bills: the Building America’s Trust Act, sponsored in August 2017, and the Secure and Succeed Act, introduced the following month and later endorsed by the White House. Both border security and wall-funding bills had nearly identical LPR provisions on the Laredo pilot program and the $125 million in upgrades of existing cameras.

The legislative texts of both House bills include nearly identical language on license plate reader funding.
The inclusion in the Cornyn bill came after over a year of dedicated, behind-the-scenes advocacy.

In 2017, Alonzo wrote to Perceptics CEO John Dalton that officials at his company should consider giving money to Cornyn because the Texas Republican “wants to be at the forefront of immigration and border policy in the Trump era, he is very powerful in the Senate as Majority Whip, and he’s arguably the most powerful member of Texas’s congressional delegation.”

The team of lobbyists also had a close relationship with the senator through a trusted confidant.

Matt Johnson, a former Podesta Group lobbyist, had previously worked for Cornyn as his chief counsel. Before the Podesta Group disbanded in late 2017, the firm included Cristina Antelo, a Democratic lobbyist working with Perceptics, and provided lobbying services to Perceptics.

“Hey fellas,” wrote Antelo, now a principal at Ferox Strategies, in an email to Perceptics executives last year, attaching an invitation to a fundraiser hosted by Johnson. “Attached is an invite for an event with Cornyn next week hosted by our buddy Matt. I think it’s a good idea to participate and not only donate to him but to do it through Matt to make sure we keep up the connection,” she wrote.

Cornyn, Antelo added, “is in leadership, from Tx so on the border, sits on the judiciary committee and has always been helpful to us including this last year by including our language in his border security bill. Can you guys write a check for $1k and can one of you attend?”

Federal Election Commission records show that Dalton ultimately donated to Cornyn’s leadership committee, the Alamo PAC, providing $1,000 in 2017 and $500 in 2018.

In a statement to The Intercept, Antelo explained that her team “spent time on Capitol Hill educating members of Congress about the need to replace aging license plate reader cameras at US land borders, including the allocation of funds to be made available for an open, competitive bid procurement for their replacement.”

“Perceptics supports the mission of homeland security and continues to have every confidence in the superior quality of their equipment,” she added.

Since the attacks on September 11, 2001, the government has spent nearly $1 trillion on a variety of counterterrorism and Homeland Security measures. The wave of cash has flowed to a range of private contractors, including those with a special focus on technology used to identify and track individuals and vehicles entering the country.

While government austerity measures in 2011 briefly slowed down the spending spree, the immigration debates in Congress, which have often centered around border security, have revived efforts by industry to harness government spending on surveillance, detention, and other forms of security technology. The 2013 bipartisan immigration bill, for example, included money for drones, helicopters, detention centers, and an array of surveillance technology to prevent future unauthorized immigration.
https://theintercept.com/2019/08/01/per ... e-readers/


Donald Trump's fascist song of love: Total submission to him; widespread racism for all
Trump's attacks on black people are not random racist outbursts. They're part of a strategy to destroy democracy


Chauncey DeVega
Donald Trump has repeatedly shown, through both his words and deeds, that he is a white supremacist. Over the course of the last few weeks, he has launched (even more) racist fusillades against black and brown people. Trump and his advisers have clearly decided that's how he will win the 2020 presidential election.

Trump's most recent racist attacks began two weeks ago with his tweets suggesting that Democratic congresswomen Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar should "go back" to their supposed home countries because they dared to criticize his policies — especially the detention of black and brown migrants and refugees in concentration camps. To state the obvious, these congresswomen are Americans.

Last weekend, Trump turned eliminationist and genocidal language against Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, chair of the House Oversight Committee — which is investigating numerous aspects of the Trump presidency. Trump described "Cumming District" [sic] as "a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess" and a "very dangerous & filthy place," and implied that Cummings himself might be corrupt. In fact, Cummings is a well-respected and well-liked member of Congress who has prided himself on friendly relations with many Republicans (none of whom stood up to defend him against the president's racist taunts).

Earlier this week Trump turned to the Rev. Al Sharpton, using language frequently deployed by white supremacists in claiming that the longtime civil rights leader "Hates Whites & Cops!"


All the Democratic candidates who hope to run against Trump condemned his racism during the CNN debates in Detroit this week. On Tuesday, Rep. Rashida Tlaib fought back against Trump's racist screeds and attempts at character assassination against her and her colleagues, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that "This behavior is sadly familiar — almost every day, he disgraces his office with rhetoric rooted in hate."

On the same day Quinnipiac University released a public opinion poll which showed that 51 percent of Americans believe that Trump is a racist. Only 8 percent of Republicans subscribe to that view, which should surprise no one. Trump won the 2016 election largely because of white racism. By implication, Trump's supporters and the Republican Party as a whole both tacitly and actively endorse his white supremacist and racist policies, behavior and beliefs.

Following the Democratic debate on Tuesday night, Trump (again) attacked CNN host Don Lemon on Twitter as "the dumbest man on television, [who] insinuated last night while asking a debate 'question' that I was a racist, when in fact I am 'the least racist person in the world.' Perhaps someone should explain to Don that he is supposed to be neutral, unbiased & fair or is he too dumb (stupid} to understand that."

Don Lemon is not dumb. But he is black, and Donald Trump believes that black people are less intelligent than white people.

Widespread condemnation of Trump's racist and authoritarian behavior and beliefs is essential if America is to remain a democracy in the near present and future. But Trump's racist attacks on the "Squad," as well as on Cummings, Sharpton and Lemon, must also be understood not in isolation but instead as part of a much larger authoritarian project.

In his 2017 book "Aspirational Fascism," political theorist William E. Connolly writes that Trump is a would-be dictator who "pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, a law-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police, a militarist, and a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for the Big Lies he advances." Here, Connolly locates Trump's racist attacks as tactics in service of a larger strategy.

Central to Trump and the Republican Party's fascist agenda are beliefs about love of country, the meaning of community and how national belonging is defined — and the walls erected around all of these ideas. Trump attacked the Squad's members by writing: "I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country. They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation!"

Unfortunately, too many journalists, reporters and other political observers still chase phantoms of "material self-interest" or "economic anxiety" in the "white working class" in a near-futile effort to make sense of Trumpism. In reality the worst human emotions — and how best to manipulate them — often offer better explanations for how politics works in the real world.

"Love" is both a noun and a verb. Who gets to define what it means to love their country? What actions qualify as "approved" and "acceptable" expressions of love of country? What about legitimate criticism? What about those who fight and work to make their country a better place, and do so precisely because they are critical of their country? Did the freedom fighters who struggled, bled and died during the civil rights movement to bring down Jim and Jane Crow love their country? What of the activists who worked so hard to end the Vietnam War? Who fought for women's rights? The rights of gays and lesbians? The rights of the disabled?

Are some groups of people allowed to criticize America and have that seen as an act of love, while other people who criticize their own country are viewed as "traitorous" and "un-American"? Who gets to play referee?

For Donald Trump, "love" means submission to him. More broadly, Donald Trump's "love" of country is channeled through racial authoritarianism, where nonwhites are to be submissive and silent, surrendering to white power and white dominance over every area of American life. In this deranged worldview, to be an "American" means to be "white" first of all. And the most "authentic" kind of American is not merely "white" but also a "Christian" and "conservative" Trump cultist. (I use the scare-quotes to emphasize that none of those words have clear or obvious meanings.)

Of course there are exceptions. Black and brown conservatives can try to buy their way into political whiteness by being enthusiastic supporters, defenders and excuse-makers for Trump and the white right.

When asked the day after Trump's political hate rally in North Carolina about the president's racist slurs against the four progressive congresswomen, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., basically offered an explanation of honorary whiteness. He told reporters, “I don’t think a Somali refugee embracing Trump would be asked to go back. If you’re racist, you want everybody to go back because they are black or Muslim. That’s not what this is about. What this is about to me is that these four congresswomen, in their own way, have been incredibly provocative. ... If you think he’s as racist, that’s up to you. I don’t. ... For President Trump, if you embrace his policies, doesn’t matter where you come from, he probably likes you.”

Leonard Pitts Jr. offered this additional context in a recent op-ed for the Miami Herald:

While there is no official “honorary white” status in this country, American politics has evolved a rough analog. As lily-white conservatism has lurched deeper into a brazen racism and xenophobia reminiscent of the 1950s, black and brown people willing to use their color to give it moral cover have seen themselves eagerly embraced by those whose sins they abet.

It’s not that people of color can’t or shouldn’t be conservative, as that term was once understood. But this modern iteration doesn’t care about small government or muscular diplomacy. Rather, it is working to normalize racism and enshrine xenophobia, and if you’re black or brown and still don’t realize that, well, again, wow.

The thing is, honorary whiteness has its limitations. Consider Barry Martin, an honorary white black dancer who toured South Africa in 1983 and was in a single-car accident while there. An ambulance picked up the white driver, but left Martin in the wreckage. A black motorist happened by and took him to a white hospital where he was refused admission. Eventually, Martin wound up in the black section of another hospital.

Somewhere in all that jostling, his injured spine was severed. Martin became a quadriplegic. He never walked, much less danced, again.

Take his story as an object lesson, you honorary whites of American politics: You are not special, only useful.

You’d be wise to learn the difference.

Trump's twisted understanding of who is a "real American" — and, by extension, whose love of the country is deemed authentic — rests upon a commitment to protect, defend and expand white privilege. This campaign to write nonwhites out of full membership in the American polity has had great material consequences: the white-black wealth gap being one of the most obvious examples. There are emotional and psychological consequences as well.

Nonwhites, especially black Americans (the only group who had to be explicitly written into the U.S. Constitution as citizens), occupy a type of liminal and contingent space in America. Such a state of being causes racial battle-fatigue and all the associated negative health outcomes that stem from it. This state of conditional "American-ness" quite literally kills black people through "negrophobia," manifested, for example, when police and other law enforcement agents abuse or murder black people with relative impunity.

Because America is a racialized democracy, citizenship and belonging are calculated by one's proximity to "whiteness." By definition, there is no way in America for black people as a group to ever "graduate" or be "promoted" into whiteness — to do so would destroy what it means to be white in this country.

Writing at the Atlantic, historian Ibram X. Kendi explains this by imagining a Trump supporter in a MAGA cap, working on his antique car in his Mississippi driveway:

That he is at home, that he is in his country, is as much a fact of his existence as the tool clenched in his hand, as the sunrays shooting past the Mississippi trees hovering above his sweaty hat and its four beaming white words.

Nothing is more certain to him than that he is an American—and that I am not. My living here, being born here, and being a citizen here — none of those fine details matter. To him, to millions like him, to their white-nationalist father in the White House, I am not an American. They want me to prove, like all the Barack Obamas, that I’m really an American.

This blend of nativism, racism, and nationalism is central to Trumpism, to their worldview. They view me as, they disregard me as, an illegal alien, like those four progressive congresswomen of color. I am tolerated until I am not. I can dine on American soil until I demand a role in remaking the menu that is killing me, like those four progressive congresswomen of color.

What I do know is that historically, people like me have only truly been all-American — if all-American is not constantly being told to “go back to your country” or “act like an American” — when we did not resist enslavement on a plantation, or in poverty, or in a prison with or without bars shackling our human potential and cultural flowering. ... Am I an American only when I act like a slave?

As always, racism and white supremacy rests upon a foundation of hypocrisy. These questions of love of country and patriotism are no exceptions. On this, the 100th anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919 — when white mobs ran amok across the United States, destroying African American communities and killing black people by the hundreds — one cannot forget that black soldiers were special targets for white rage. These "Men of Bronze," such as the Harlem Hellfighters, had survived the killing fields of World War I in Europe only to return to Jim Crow America, where black folks' patriotism was viewed as a threat to the existing racial order.

In the words of the Equal Justice Initiative: "Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, thousands of black veterans were accosted, assaulted, and attacked, and many were lynched. Black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority; many survived near-lynchings; and countless others suffered severe assaults and social humiliation."

The hypocrisy of whiteness continues at present through Donald Trump and the white right's weaponized white identity politics.

Donald Trump and his supporters can obsessively criticize America in the harshest and most negative terms — and win an election by doing so — yet their national belonging and love of country is, for the most part, never questioned.

The vast majority of black Americans (and of course Native Americans) were in the United States decades or centuries before Donald Trump's German grandparents got here, along with millions of other "white" people who arrived in America during the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Many of whom were not originally understood as "white," a term that has constantly been in flux.) Yet those people's identities as "real Americans" generally go unquestioned. Such is the fetishist power of whiteness in America.

With the rise of Trump and his fascist movement, America faces perhaps its greatest challenge since World War II, if not since the Civil War. Donald Trump and his political movement have shown that they are determined to overthrow America's multiracial democracy through all available means, both legal and otherwise.

When viewed through a longer social and historical lens, Donald Trump and the white right's desperate campaign to protect the material and psychological wages of whiteness for all time in America is a battle against democracy.

Writing for the Guardian, Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter, author of the award winning book "The History of White People," summarizes the stakes:

With Trump and his party re-enacting the history of American white supremacy, citizens who cherish democracy must take the opposite side in our national drama and stage a counter re-enactment.

Just as Trump has carried his just-happen-to-be-white into proud-to-be-white followers and into white nationalism, anti-Trump Americans must carry the nation in a saner direction. And just as Trump’s racism calls up old themes in America’s history, anti-racists must now act on a history of their own, one sufficiently powerful to defeat Trumpism, as it defeated slavery, segregation and disfranchisement.

African Americans already know this history and are already motivated. Other people of colour are learning it and engaging with the cause. And while Trump has galvanised his white people for bigotry, now anti-Trump white people need to step up into activism — on behalf of multiracial, multicultural American democracy.

Painter has offered a diagnosis and a call to action. Robert Mueller did not save American democracy from Donald Trump. The Democratic Party continues to show that it is not up to the challenge of saving American democracy from Donald Trump. The responsibility, as it so often does, is in the hands of the American people. Will enough good Americans rise to the challenge or have they already been cowed and beaten into submission?

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/01/donald ... yone-else/
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 08, 2019 9:19 am

Alex Love


HAPPENING NOW: In Forrest, Mississippi where one of the #ICE raids happened nearby Children of those who were arrested are left alone in the streets crying for help. Strangers and neighbors are taking them to a local gym to be put up for the night



More images as volunteers try to feed the kids donated food and drinks for dinner tonight. But most children are still devastated and crying for their parents and can’t eat. FULL STORY TONIGHT ON @WJTV. #FocusedOnYou
Image
Image
Image
https://twitter.com/AlexLoveWJTV/status ... 9105973248



Children of undocumented immigrants arrested in Mississippi rely on strangers for food and shelter
Aug 8, 2019 / 07:04 AM UTC
News
Following this massive undocumented immigration enforcement many children of those arrested across the state are now left homeless with nowhere to go.

12 News Reporter Alex Love went out to Forest, Mississippi where community leaders are coming together to put them up for the night in a gym. He was granted permission to talk to community leaders and the children.

These children who some are as young as toddlers were relying on neighbors and even strangers to pick them up outside their homes after school and drive them to a community fitness center where people tried to keep them calm. But many kids could not stop crying for mom and dad.


An 11-year-old girl is left crying outside in Forest after her dad was arrested.
Fighting back tears 11 year old Magdalena Gomez Gregorio expressed to us her devastation being alone without her dad.

“Government please show some heart,” Gregoria cried. “Let my parent be free and everyone else please don’t leave the child with cryness and everything.”

This came after ice agents raided several food processing plants in Mississippi arresting 680 people believed to be in the country illegally.

“While we are a nation of immigrants, more than that we are first and foremost a nation of laws,” Southern District U.S Attorney Mike Hurst argued.


A girl tries to eat, but can’t fight back tears wondering where her parents are.
But those children left behind and families impacted by each raid stressed their parents and friends are good people.

“I need my dad and mommy,” Gregorio said. “My dad didn’t do anything, he’s not a criminal.”

“The children that I’m with their moms been here for 15 years and she has no record,” Christina Peralta told us. “A lot of people here have no record they’ve been here for 10-12 years.”

For Christina Peralta who’s the godmother of two children who’s mom was arrested, she’s helpless as she watches the boys wonder when they’ll see their mother again.

“He said his mom is gone, that he’s upset with Trump, he said he just wants his mom back,” Peralta continued. “And they’ve been crying all day long since they got home from school.”

But with the help of Clear Creek Boot Camp owner Jordan Barnes and other community leaders the kids will have a roof to sleep under at his gym for the night with donated food to eat.

“We’re going to have bedding available for them and we’re going to have food available for them just to get them through the night,” Barnes explained. “And if they need transportation to school tomorrow we’ll also take care of that.”

And in times like these those in forest stress you cannot forget the children through this.

“I understand the law and how everything works and everything needs to have a system,” Barnes stated. “But everybody needs to hold the kids first and foremost in their minds and that’s what we’ve tried to do here is give them a place to stay and ease the pain a little bit.”

To donate food or supplies just call Jordan Barnes at The Clear Creek Boot Camp at (601) 940-1690.
https://www.wjtv.com/news/children-of-u ... d-shelter/
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 09, 2019 6:45 am

USATODAY looked at how President Trump has described immigrants at his political rallies since he took office.

He used the word "invasion" 19 times.

"Animal" 34 times.

"Killer" 32 time



https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=humqaywTuP4

following a massive undocumented immigration enforcement operation that resulted in more than 650 arrested in Mississippi, many children of those taken into custody are now left homeless with nowhere to go
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 17, 2019 10:49 am

American concentration camps for children, aerial view.
Image
https://twitter.com/xeni
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby 82_28 » Sat Aug 17, 2019 12:15 pm

Looking at those kids the far superior legacy diets of Mexico did not translate into the fast food land of Mississippi. I've always gone with the real Mexican or central American food. Look at that crying girl. They're feeding her pepperoni pizza, a soda and some chips on the fucking floor. I'm surprised they were kind enough to put that slice of pizza on a napkin.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 19, 2019 5:25 pm

The New York Times


The Trump administration's policies have left nearly 58,000 people seeking asylum stranded in Mexico.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1163114603871690759



How Trump’s Policies Are Leaving Thousands of Asylum Seekers Waiting in Mexico
Aug 18, 2019
Image
For years, migrants arriving in Tijuana hoping to seek asylum in the United States have been told to add their names to a waiting list kept by Mexican immigration officials. Amid a surge in arrivals over the last year, which led to Trump administration policies designed to deter them, that list — kept in a handwritten notebook — has stretched to thousands of names.

In January in Tijuana: About 1,300 asylum seekers were processed.
About 2,400 were on the waiting list by the end of the month.

Each icon represents 100 asylum seekers.

Port of Entry


Start of line

End of line

By August, the list had grown to more than 10,000 people, according to Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization for migrants. With an average of 34 people allowed to cross each day under a Border Patrol policy known as metering, the waiting time is now estimated to be six to nine months.

Along the border, there were already 4,900 asylum seekers on similar waiting lists in nine cities in February. (Only cities known to have at least 100 people on waiting lists are shown.)

By early August, the waiting lists had expanded to three more cities. The total number of asylum seekers on these lists surpassed 26,000.

But they are not the only ones waiting. Over the same period, under a program known as “Remain in Mexico,” the Trump administration sent back to Mexico nearly 32,000 asylum seekers already in court proceedings.

The program is expanding rapidly — nearly half of these asylum seekers were sent back in the last month.

Altogether, nearly 58,000 asylum seekers are stranded in Mexico.

Those who have yet to cross will spend weeks or months waiting their turn. Those who are sent back to wait in Mexico may not see a judge for an additional six to eight months. Even then, most cases require lengthy litigation and could last months longer.

The metering and “Remain in Mexico” policies are part of a broader Trump administration effort to push Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to accept more migrants, most of whom come from Central American countries. The administration has also sought “safe third country” agreements with those same countries to absorb asylum seekers bound for the United States. Mexico has refused to sign an agreement. Guatemala signed on July 26, after President Trump threatened it with tariffs.
Shelters and legal services organizations in cities on both sides of the border have struggled to keep up with the influx of migrants. In Mexican cities like Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo, where some shelters have begun turning away migrants because of overcrowding, migrants who cannot afford to stay in apartments or hotels sleep in the streets or on the bridges leading to the ports of entry they hope someday to cross.

Migrants, left, who were sent back to Mexico, walking past other migrants on their way to request asylum in the United States, at a bridge that connects Brownsville, Tex., and Matamoros, Mexico. At right, in Tijuana, Mexico, in November, an aerial view of a temporary shelter set up. Emilio Espejel/Associated Press, left; Mario Tama/Getty Images

Migrants in Mexico face targeted kidnappings and violence, and chances of eventually winning asylum in the United States are much lower with limited access to American lawyers.
In recent months, some migrants tired of waiting have decided to return to their home countries. The Mexican government assisted with 6,400 such returns in June, compared with fewer than 1,500 in January.
Others have sought more permanent refuge in Mexico, where asylum claims this year are expected to reach well above 80,000, according to the United Nations refugee agency.

But far more migrants choose to forgo the waiting lists and court delays and instead risk an illegal crossing into the United States. Since January, about 400,000 unaccompanied minors and migrants traveling as families have been apprehended between ports of entry; most of them are quite likely asylum seekers.
http://archive.is/Zya0u
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 24, 2019 9:15 am

CE just quietly opened another detention center, after Congress told it not to

Congress Told ICE to Detain Fewer People. Instead It Keeps Adding Private Prisons.

Image
For the seventh time this year, ICE has started using a new jail in Louisiana.


Officers stand on the roof of and outside the Adams County Correctional Facility during a 2012 riot. ICE recently started sending asylum seekers to the prison.Lauren Wood/AP
In a now familiar pattern, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has started sending immigrants to another for-profit jail in the Deep South. Mother Jones has learned that the latest addition to ICE’s rapidly expanding southern detention network is the LaSalle Correctional Center in Olla, Louisiana, a jail run by the private prison company LaSalle Corrections.

In February, Congress directed ICE to reduce its detention population, but ICE has ignored that request. After President Donald Trump forced a government shutdown in December, legislators averted another shutdown in February with a bipartisan bill that directed ICE to go from detaining nearly 49,000 people to 40,520 by October. Instead, ICE has pushed its detention population to all-time highs. The agency was detaining a record-high 55,220 people as of Saturday and has been rapidly contracting with new private prisons to house that increased number of detainees.

ICE spokesperson Bryan Cox confirmed that the agency started using the Olla jail this month. He said there are about 100 immigrants there so far. The facility can hold up to 755 people, according to LaSalle’s website.

The LaSalle Correctional Center is one of eight detention centers that ICE has started using in Louisiana and Mississippi since February, the month Congress directed the agency to detain fewer people. All of the new immigration jails are run by private prison companies. Six are run by LaSalle Corrections. The new jails have primarily been used to hold adults seeking asylum after being stopped at the southern border. As I wrote last month:

Concentrating asylum seekers in Southern states makes it particularly likely that they will lose their cases because of the region’s harsh judges and shortage of immigration lawyers. There are not enough judges in Louisiana to hear the new cases, and there are no immigration courts in Mississippi. As a result, many of these new asylum seekers will be forced to represent themselves in video hearings with out-of-state judges.

After I reported last month that ICE had quietly opened three new detention centers in the south, Democratic legislators and presidential candidates harshly criticized the move. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to ICE demanding answers about the new detention facilities. Warren wrote that “it appears that ICE has decided to place immigrant detainees at these facilities without providing proper notice, despite the fact that they suffer from a myriad of health and safety problems.” Warren asked ICE to respond to a detailed list of questions by July 25, but the agency still hasn’t gotten back to her, according to Warren’s press office.

At the start of the Trump administration, ICE was detaining, on an average day, about 1,900 people in Louisiana and none in Mississippi. The agency started using one new detention facility in each state in 2018, but that pace has quickly accelerated with the eight new centers opening this year. The 10 facilities that ICE has begun using under Trump’s administration—eight in Louisiana and two in Mississippi—have a combined capacity of more than 10,000 people. NBC News reported that more than people 6,500 were being detained in Louisiana by ICE last month, second only to Texas.

Getting out of Louisiana jails can be nearly impossible for asylum seekers. As I reported in June:

ICE’s New Orleans office, which covers five states including Louisiana and Mississippi, is the least likely of any regional office to release asylum-seekers from detention while their cases are pending. In 2018, it released 1.5 percent of migrants seeking parole—down from 75.9 percent in 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Center and American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana are suing ICE to force the New Orleans office to follow the agency’s own parole policy, which requires people to be released if they don’t pose a threat to public safety or a flight risk.

Two of the new prisons—the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana and the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi—were the subjects of damning investigations by the Nation and Mother Jones that helped spur Barack Obama’s Justice Department to move toward ending its use of private prisons. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General concluded in a 2016 report about CoreCivic’s Adams County prison:

Four years after the riot, we were deeply concerned to find that the facility was plagued by the same significant deficiencies in correctional and health services and Spanish-speaking staffing. In 19 of the 38 months following the riot, we found CoreCivic staffed correctional services at an even lower level than at the time of the riot in terms of actual post coverage. Yet CoreCivic’s monthly reports to the BOP, which were based on simple headcounts, showed that correctional staffing levels had improved in 36 of those 38 months.

The Justice Department’s Federal Bureau of Prisons announced this May that it would not renew its contract with Adams County. ICE quickly decided to fill that void.

On August 2, detainees at the jail in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, that ICE started using in 2018 said they were beaten and pepper-sprayed after protesting their indefinite detention. “There’s even an ambulance here,” read a text message obtained by Mother Jones reporter Fernanda Echavarri. “Help us please this is ugly!” A local official confirmed at the time that pepper spray was used to “deescalate” a “small disturbance,” but denied that additional force was used. That weekend more than 100 immigrants were pepper-sprayed at a GEO Group detention center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, after demonstrating in the yard. Cox told BuzzFeed News that “a brief, calculated use of pepper spray” was used to disperse detainees who refused to go inside.

Back in February, a summary of the spending bill from the Senate Appropriations Committee stated that the agreement “rejects the President’s request to increase the number of detention beds to 52,000.” But the bill didn’t stop ICE from using funds transferred from other parts of the Department of Homeland Security to detain more people. Republicans said that flexibility would allow ICE to detain up to 58,000 people.

Immigrant advocates agreed that the bill wasn’t as strong as Democratic leaders were making it out to be. Mary Small, then the policy director at Detention Watch Network, said in February, “I can’t tell you anything about this deal that is better than the status quo.” In 2018, Congress had also directed ICE to detain 40,520 people only to have ICE blow past that limit. “ICE tried to change facts on the ground so Congress would bail them out and now Congress is bailing them out,” Small said. If past years are any indication, ICE will soon be asking for another bailout to pay for its new jails in the South.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... e-prisons/



ICE shut down hotline for detained immigrants after it was featured on 'Orange Is the New Black': report
John Bowden08/23/19 01:54 PM EDT
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reportedly shut down a toll-free hotline for detained immigrants to connect with a lawyer after it was featured on the hit Netflix series "Orange Is The New Black."

The Los Angeles Times reported that a hotline operated for several years by the Freedom for Immigrants organization was shut down less than two weeks after it was mentioned on the show.

Christina Fialho, co-executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, told the Times that the move was retaliatory.

“Even a freely given benefit such as the pro bono hotline can’t be taken away simply because the government is now unhappy with how we are sharing with the public what we know from our communications with people inside,” she said.

Representatives for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return requests for comment from The Hill.

The hotlines were the only toll-free option that many immigrants in the detention facilities had, as they do not have the right to a free phone call upon being detained and the facilities do not allow calls to 1-800 numbers.

The Freedom for Immigrants' number was accessible to detainees through an extension.

Cast members of "Orange Is the New Black" have called upon ICE to restore the hotline.

“Now we see life mimic art in the most destructive way,” Laura Gomez, who plays Blanca on the show, told the Los Angeles Times. “I wish this were more of a fictional situation and we were exaggerating reality, but it’s kind of the other way around.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administra ... s-featured
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 29, 2019 11:11 am

More
ICE and CBP admit that they’ve used GPS devices without a warrant to track vehicles entering the U.S. But they refuse to disclose details about the practice. We’re suing to find out.



EFF Sues DHS To Uncover Information About Border Agents Using GPS Devices Without a Warrant To Track Vehicles
Washington, D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its component agencies today to obtain information about the agencies’ warrantless use of global positioning system (GPS) devices to track vehicles entering the U.S.

In 2012, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jones that such warrantless GPS tracking inside the U.S. is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) disclosed in court filings in 2018 that they used GPS devices without a warrant at the border, the federal judge overseeing the case extended the Supreme Court’s ban to include such searches at the border. EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeks to uncover information and provide the public with details about the agencies’ policies and procedures for warrantless GPS tracking.

In United States v. Ignjatov, a criminal case in California, the court found that the practice of allowing agents to use GPS devices without a warrant rose to the level of government misconduct because it clearly violated the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision. There, government agents in Port Huron, Michigan, placed GPS devices on a truck without a warrant, tracked it for nearly two days, and arrested the drivers in California­—thousands of miles from the border where they entered. The government provided evidence that both ICE and CBP had policies allowing agents to use GPS devices without a warrant, and also submitted a declaration from an ICE official who stated the agency believed the policy was consistent with the Jones decision.

“Once again, ICE and CBP prove themselves to be rogue agencies by conducting searches that violate the Fourth Amendment and ignore Supreme Court precedent,” said EFF Staff Attorney Saira Hussain. “Let’s be clear: the Constitution still applies at the border.

“The public deserves to know when these searches began, if they are still allowed, and how they work. Our lawsuit seeks to uncover this information and shine a light on this outrageous practice,” said Hussain.

In a separate case against U.S. immigration agencies over warrantless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at the border, EFF obtained documents and deposition testimony earlier this year revealing that CBP and ICE policies authorizing device searches were unconstitutionally broad and allowed government agencies to use the pretext of the border to make an end-run around the First and Fourth Amendments. EFF has asked a court to skip a trial and rule in favor of the 11 travelers who are plaintiffs.

For the FOIA complaint:
https://www.eff.org/document/eff-v-dhs- ... s-tracking

For more on border searches:
https://www.eff.org/issues/border-searches
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff- ... es-without
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:00 am

Mumps sickens hundreds of detained migrants in 19 states

Mumps has swept through 57 immigration detention facilities in 19 states since September, according to the first U.S. government report on the outbreaks in the overloaded immigration system.

The virus sickened 898 adult migrants and 33 detention center staffers, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its report Thursday.

New cases continue as migrants are taken into custody or transferred between facilities, the report said. As of last week, outbreaks were happening in 15 facilities in seven states.

In response to the report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Bryan Cox said medical professionals at detention facilities screen all new detainees within 24 hours of their arrival to ensure that highly contagious diseases are not spread.

Cox said some detainees come from countries where communicable diseases are less controlled than in the U.S. and carry with them the risk of spreading infection.

The CDC report said more than 80% of patients were exposed while in custody. Mumps is a contagious virus that causes swollen glands, puffy cheeks, fever, headaches and, in severe cases, hearing loss and meningitis.

In the U.S., vaccines have drastically reduced the number of mumps cases. Only a few hundred cases are reported most years, with periodic outbreaks involving colleges or other places where people are in close contact.

In the migrant center outbreaks, at least 13 people were hospitalized, the CDC reported.

A large portion of the cases have been in Texas. The Texas Department of State Health Services raised the alarm in December, followed by six other state health departments in early January, prompting what the CDC report calls “a coordinated national outbreak response.”

ICE has given more than 25,000 doses of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine in the affected facilities.

The CDC did not identify detention facilities, but said 34 of them are operated by private companies. The report said migrants were being held in 315 facilities in mid-August.

Nashville immigration attorney R. Andrew Free has been tracking facilities with mumps outbreaks from reports of advocates and lawyers representing detainees.

“This has all the makings of a public health crisis,” Free said. “ICE has demonstrated itself incapable of ensuring the health and safety of people inside these facilities.”

An influx of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this year has taxed the immigration system. The CDC report dealt only with mumps, not other health problems in detention facilities. At least two migrant children have died of complications of the flu after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol.

The CDC report said detention facilities should follow guidance from state and local health departments when responding to mumps.

___

Follow AP Medical Writer Carla K. Johnson on Twitter: @CarlaKJohnson

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
https://apnews.com/1684ee01b6754c44bf72 ... lthScience



The Trump Administration Wants To Start DNA Testing Undocumented Immigrants In Government Custody
A draft rule, seen by BuzzFeed News, said hundreds of thousands of people could have their DNA collected each year if it is fully implemented.

Hamed Aleaziz

Josh Dawsey / AP
Immigrants stand in a CBP detention pen in McAllen, Texas, during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence.
A draft rule, seen by BuzzFeed News, said hundreds of thousands of people could have their DNA collected each year if it is fully implemented.

The Trump administration wants to enable Customs and Border Protection officials to collect DNA samples from undocumented immigrants in its custody, according to a draft policy obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The move will likely inspire the anger of civil liberties and immigrant advocates, who argue that the government should not draw sensitive personal information from people without being tied to a specific crime.

Administration officials estimate that CBP officials would spend more than 20,000 additional work hours on such a policy in its first year of implementation. Hundreds of thousands of individuals could have their DNA collected each year if the draft regulation, proposed by the Department of Justice, is fully implemented.

While the regulation does not specifically say Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials would also collect DNA from people in their custody, it also does not limit them from doing so.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a DHS official said the federal agency "is working closely with the Department of Justice on a path forward for DNA collection."

The official noted an ICE pilot program at the southwest border earlier this year, in which the agency took voluntary DNA tests of those they suspected of fraudulently claiming to be families. "ICE has identified dozens of cases in which children had no familial relation to the adults accompanying them. In the first operation — Operation Double Helix 1.0 — 16 out of 84 family units were identified as fraudulent based on negative DNA results. And in the second — Operation Double Helix 2.0 — 79 of 522 family units were identified as fraudulent based on negative DNA results, to date," the official said.

Proposed regulations are not immediately enacted and require a 60-day comment period.

Administration officials cite a statute — the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 — that allows federal agencies to collect DNA from individuals in their custody, including those who are not American. But previous DOJ regulations exempted agencies under the Department of Homeland Security — including CBP and ICE — from conducting such collection in certain circumstances.

In 2010, then–DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano narrowed the exemption, saying people who were not detained on criminal charges and those who were awaiting deportation proceedings would not have their DNA collected.

The current draft proposal would cut the exception all together — opening it up to include people who are awaiting deportation and those who are not charged with a crime, such as undocumented immigrants, to the collection.

Trump administration officials argue that the exemption is no longer necessary and that collection would aid border officials in better assessing the individuals who cross into the country without authorization. The DNA results could then be placed into a nationwide database that contains millions of other profiles for hits on potential previous criminal activity, officials explained in the proposal.

Former senior DHS officials said an expansion of DNA collection would likely achieve little, drain resources, and force agents to do work they’d rather not be doing.

“In many ways, it’s unnecessary from a law enforcement perspective,” said John Sandweg, a former senior immigration official in the Obama administration. “I don’t understand what you’re going to get out of it. The idea that some guy crossing the border committed a crime, returned, and came back all undetected is very remote.”

Sandweg said that there was little desire at either ICE or CBP to begin mass DNA testing during the Obama administration.

Such a proposal would also change the way immigrants are treated in federal custody, said Jonathan Meyer, a former deputy general counsel at DHS.

“It would, for the first time in this context, treat undocumented immigrants more like criminals in that DNA testing of this type is used only in a pure criminal context,” he said. “DNA testing is considered one of the more invasive actions that the government can take. You are obtaining a physical substance from a person’s body, with the potential to learn an almost infinite amount of information about the person.”

Civil liberties groups have long challenged the expansion of DNA collection from citizens and noncitizens alike.

“DNA collection programs allow the government to obtain sensitive and private information on a person without any precursor level of suspicion and without showing that the data collected is tied to a specific crime,” wrote the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a statement on federal DNA collection. Federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI generally take DNA samples from arrestees.

In recent weeks, Fox News has interviewed some CBP officials who have called for the agency to collect DNA from detainees. The US Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative body, wrote to the administration that it needed to comply with the 2005 law. In response, Robert Perez, the CBP deputy commissioner, cited the exception written by Obama administration officials.

The draft regulation states that DHS officials would rely on software that would allow them to quickly obtain DNA from a given person and cut collection time from 15 minutes to 5 minutes. DOJ officials estimate that DHS officers will spend more than 20,000 hours the first year using the software, more than 40,000 the second year, and more than 60,000 the third year.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ha ... nted-immig



Health Risks to Immigrants in Trump Administration's Custody Prompt Comparisons to Nazi Camps
Just as immigrants in the custody of ICE are denied vaccines, those in the concentration camps were denied vaccines

Christopher Brauchli
"A Report on the Banality of Evil"
—Hannah Arendt

That the comparison can be made is odious—so are the conditions. So is the one imposing them. He is the most odious of all and his stench pervades the country. He wasn't the first one to implement it when confronted by those he has made helpless. It happened in Hitler's Germany.

It was not a long description. It read, in part, as follows:

"The harsh living conditions, characterized by crowding, absent sanitation and poor personal hygiene led to considerable morbidity, mainly due to infections, disease and famine... Crowding was the rule, and each cot was occupied simultaneously by several patients regardless of their condition."
—"Medicine in the Concentration Camps of the Third Reich"

Just as immigrants in the custody of ICE are denied vaccines, those in the concentration camps were denied vaccines. The importance of the vaccines was shown by the steps that were taken to obtain vaccines by those not in the concentration camps. In a description in the Washington Post of the importance vaccines played in the lives of those not held in German concentration camps where vaccines were not available, Helene Sinnreich, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, explained: "Vaccines emerged as a powerful, if expensive, tool for resistance. Smugglers found ways to bring medicine and even nascent vaccines into the ghetto... For Jews of the ghetto, vaccines were precious protection and symbolized a belief in their own future."

The Trump story is the decision made by Trumpistas not to provide vaccines to children and others in their custody. Unlike victims of the Nazi regime, immigrants in the custody of the U.S. government who were deprived of the vaccines lacked the ability to get them elsewhere.

As of this writing only three children in Trump's custody have died. They might not have died had they been provided the flu vaccine. Dr. Jonathan Winickoff, a pediatric professor at Harvard, told CNBC that child deaths are rare events. "When I learned that multiple children had died in detention from potentially preventable causes, it truly disturbed me. The country needs urgent answers... so that children stop dying in detention." Alia Sunderji, a pediatric emergency physician, observes that normally influenza doesn't pose much of a threat to children. But when children are placed in overcrowded and generally obscene conditions as Trump has done, you have created a "death trap."

It is not only the children held in detention camps whose health is at risk. In another mark of the compassion tTrump and his cronies have for those with medical conditions, on Aug. 6, 2019 the Trumpistas brought the Medical Deferred Action Program to an end.

The beneficiaries of the program were those with illnesses that could not be treated in their home countries or whose children could not be treated in their home countries. Under the Medical Deferred Action Program, those who have entered the country in need of life saving medical care, for themselves or their children, were permitted to stay for up to two years to receive the needed medical treatment. If the need still existed at the end of the two-year period, their stay could be extended for an additional two years. Immigrants present in the United States under that program were permitted to have employment to support themselves and their families.

The program was administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Effective Aug. 7, the program was taken over by the masters of compassion, ICE, and within a week it brought the program to an end. It began sending letters to all the families who were in the United States because of the need for medical treatment and were here because of the Medical Deferred Action Program.

The letters notified the immigrants that they were no longer welcome and would have to leave the country within 33 days. The letter made no exception for those whose lives depended on being able to receive the kind of treatment only available in the United States. It applied to those who had just arrived and those who had been here for many years. In Boston alone, there are children from 20 families whose lives depend on being able to continue receiving treatment for illnesses such as muscular dystrophy, HIV, and other serious illnesses. They have been given 33 days to leave.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019 ... nazi-camps
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Sep 05, 2019 11:15 pm

‘Can’t feel my heart:’ IG says separated kids traumatized

WASHINGTON (AP) — Separated from his father at the U.S.-Mexico border last year, the little boy, about 7 or 8, was under the delusion that his dad had been killed. And he thought he was next.

Other children believed their parents had abandoned them. And some suffered physical symptoms because of their mental trauma, clinicians reported to investigators with a government watchdog.

“You get a lot of ‘my chest hurts,’ even though everything is fine” medically, a clinician told investigators. The children would describe emotional symptoms: “Every heartbeat hurts,” or “I can’t feel my heart.”

Children separated during the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance policy” last year, many already distressed in their home countries or by their journey, showed more fear, feelings of abandonment and post-traumatic stress symptoms than children who were not separated, according to a report Wednesday from the inspector general’s office in the Department of Health and Human Services.

The chaotic reunification process only added to their ordeal.

Some cried inconsolably. Some were angry and confused. “Other children expressed feelings of fear or guilt and became concerned for their parents’ welfare,” according to the report.

The child who believed his father was killed “ultimately required emergency psychiatric care to address his mental health distress,” a program director told investigators.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story is part of an ongoing joint investigation between The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” on the treatment of migrant children, which includes an upcoming film.

___

Child psychiatrist Dr. Gilbert Kliman, who interviewed dozens of migrant children in shelters after zero-tolerance took effect, told the PBS series “Frontline” and The Associated Press that the kids can move on with their lives after reunifying with parents but may never get over it.

As children they have night terrors, separation anxiety, trouble concentrating. As they become adults, they face greater risks of mental and physical challenges, from depression to cancer.

Among the separated children, he foresees “an epidemic of physical, psychosomatic health problems that are costly to society as well as to the individual child grown up. I call it a vast, cruel experiment on the backs of children.”

The AP obtained a copy of the report in advance of the official release, the first substantial accounting by a government agency on how family separation under the Trump policy has affected the mental health of children. It was based on interviews with about 100 mental health clinicians who had regular interactions with children but did not directly address the quality of the care the children did receive.

“Facilities reported that addressing the needs of separated children was particularly challenging, because these children exhibited more fear, feelings of abandonment and post-traumatic stress than children who were not separated,” said Deputy Inspector General Ann Maxwell. “Separated children are also younger than the teenagers facilities were used to caring for.”

A second report Wednesday by the watchdog found that thousands of childcare workers were given direct access to migrant children before completing required background and fingerprint checks.

The report covers a period last year when facilities were overwhelmed by the policy under which at least 2,500 children were separated from their parents. They stayed behind in border custody while their parents were taken to federal court for criminal proceedings. Children held longer than 72 hours were transferred into HHS custody and placed in shelters that have traditionally cared for children who crossed the border alone.

Migrant children stay in the shelters, run by government-funded organizations, until released to a sponsor, usually a parent or close relative.

The watchdog said the longer children were in custody, the more their mental health deteriorated, and it recommended minimizing that time. It also suggested creating better mental health care options and hiring more trained staff.

The Administration for Children and Families, the HHS division that manages children, concurred with the recommendations and said it had already begun implementing them, including hiring a board-certified child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist to serve as a mental health team leader.

Department Assistant Secretary Lynn Johnson said in a letter to the watchdog that the average length of stay is much shorter now and noted the report was not a clinical review of treatment.

She wrote that “significant factors” beyond the agency’s control contributed to “the issues identified in the report.” Those included a surge in children at the border, the children’s unique mental health needs and a shortage of qualified bilingual clinicians, especially in rural areas.

She said that efforts were made to bring in more medical health professionals, but “adverse media coverage and negative public perception ... have hampered efforts to expand.”

After a federal judge ordered the children reunified with their parents, guidance on how to do it kept changing and that led to further anxiety and distress, according to the report.

In one case, a child was moved from a Florida facility to Texas to be reunited with her father. After the child made several trips to the detention center, she was returned to the Florida facility “in shambles,” without ever seeing him.

Investigators visited 45 facilities in 10 states during August and September of 2018, interviewing about mental health clinicians.

During the interviews, there were almost 9,000 children in shelters; nearly 85% were 13-17 in age, 13% were 6-12 and 2% were infants to age 5.

At a minimum, each child in government custody is to receive one counseling session per week, plus two group sessions to discuss issues.

But the report found that mental health staff were overwhelmed. Usually there is one mental health clinician for 12 children, but during the period investigators studied, there were more than 25 children for one clinician.

A second Office of Inspector General report found 31 of the 45 facilities reviewed had hired case managers who did not meet Office of Refugee Resettlement requirements, including many without the required education. In addition, the review found 28 of the 45 facilities didn’t have enough mental health workers.

That meant some children didn’t receive proper treatment, the report found. And some children who suffered more severe illnesses — self-harming, suicidal behavior or actual suicide attempts — were not transferred quickly enough to residential treatment centers.

During a time when sponsors had to be fingerprinted, children were held in facilities for as long as 93 days. The fingerprints were sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and some people in the United States illegally were arrested. Advocates said many potential sponsors feared coming to get the children while the policy was in effect.

After it was scrapped in March, the average stay dropped to 58 days and was 48 days in April.

The report also addressed the question of whether children were being given psychotropic medications after media reports described the practice. The report found the instances were minimal; about 300 children overall between May and July of 2018 were prescribed antidepressants. Staff described some concerns that dosages or types of medication may not have been right.

In the second report, only four of the 45 shelters reviewed by the U.S. Health and Human Services inspector general met all staff screening requirements.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said children deserve compassionate care.

“Grantees and contractors that fail to ensure their employees are checked appropriately should not be allowed to care for these children,” said Portman.

Federal investigators also found some shelters relying on employees to report their own criminal histories. A background check found one employee — who “self-certified” that she had no history for crimes involving child abuse — had a third-degree child neglect felony on her record.

HHS Assistant Secretary Johnson said the agency has rescinded background check waivers at non-emergency shelters and is committed to ensuring care providers in residential settings have completed all screenings before working with children.

___

Burke and Mendoza reported from San Francisco.
https://www.apnews.com/63e7e47666914bf79eff7366e8eb411b
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 11, 2019 9:49 am

Trump denounced for attacking Somali refugees in Minnesota
"Can you imagine being Somali-American and watching this?" one person tweeted Thursday. "This is the kind of hate rally seen in authoritarian and fascist countries."

Written By: Washington Post | Oct 11th 2019 - 7am.
President Donald Trump rallies at the Target Center in Minneapolis Thursday, Oct. 10, 2019, in front of a crowd of nearly 20,000 people. Dana Ferguson / Forum News Service
The president soon widened his attack to target Somali refugees in Minnesota, a group that includes Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in the East African country. He promised rally attendees, who booed loudly at the mention of the state's Somali residents, that he would "give local communities a greater say in refugee policy and put in place enhanced vetting and responsible immigration controls."

"As you know for many years leaders in Washington brought large numbers of refugees to your state from Somalia without considering the impact on schools and communities and taxpayers," he said as some in the crowd jeered, adding, "You should be able to decide what is best for your own cities and for your own neighborhoods and that's what you have the right to do right now, and believe me, no other president would be doing that."

Trump's comments, the latest escalation of his ongoing feud with Omar and Somali refugees, drew fierce rebukes Thursday night from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a Democratic presidential nominee, and Democratic Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Omar also hit back at Trump over his criticisms of her.


Ilhan Omar

@IlhanMN
At his rally just now, Trump called me an “America-hating socialist” and a “disgrace.” He shouted xenophobic conspiracy theories about me. He scolded my district for voting for me.

His hate is no match for our movement. Stand with me by donating now: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/quart ... 20191010tw
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"His hate is no match for our movement," Omar tweeted, encouraging her followers to donate to her campaign.

In a tweet, Klobuchar chided Trump for "using immigrants and refugees as political pawns!"

"Immigrants and refugees have helped make our state a wonderful place to live and work - which is far more than this President has done," she wrote.

Meanwhile, Frey had a pointed response to Trump telling the rally crowd to "speak to your mayor" about the president's recently issued executive order that could keep refugees from being "resettled in any city or any state without the express written consent of that city or that state."

"Consent given," Frey tweeted. "Immigrants and refugees are welcome in Minneapolis."

Minnesota has the largest concentration of Somalis in America, with more than 52,000 people in the state reporting Somali ancestry, the Star Tribune reported in July, citing 2017 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Somalis coming directly from Africa, described as "primary refugees," started being allowed into the state in 1993, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Since then, Minnesota has welcomed almost 24,000 primary refugees, in addition to those who may have originally been relocated elsewhere in the U.S. and later moved to the Midwestern state because they were drawn there by word of mouth.

"When the people in the refugee camps heard about the early arrivals that came here and were well received, they reported back to their relatives," Abdisalam Adam, a Somali American, told the Minnesota Historical Society in 2004.

Ahmed Samatar, who came to the U.S. from Somalia in 1974 to attend the University of Wisconsin, told WCCO that Minnesota is particularly enticing to refugees because of its strong economy and reputation as "a kind and progressive place."

"It is the nature of the welcome itself and how hospitable that is," said Samatar, now a professor of international studies at Macalester College.

Trump, however, has not viewed the Somali refugees with the same kindness.

Two days before the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Trump told the crowd at a campaign rally in Minneapolis they had "suffered enough" as a result of "filthy refugee vetting" that had allowed an influx of Somalis into their state. He promised that if he became president, refugees would not be admitted "without the support of the community where they are being placed."

In recent years, Trump also reportedly "raged" at former acting homeland security secretary Elaine Duke "asking why he could not ban refugees from 'f------ Somalia,'" New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear wrote in their new book, "Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration."

Davis and Shear noted that Trump and his senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, "seemed to have a particular dislike for Somalia, often citing it or its nationals when they spoke of the potential dangers of refugees and other immigrants."

In September, the Trump administration issued an executive order giving state and local governments more freedom to reject refugees. The action came the same day the federal government announced that it had again cut its refugee program and will only allow 18,000 applicants next year, a historic low. Trump has also made efforts to ban travel to the United States from several countries, including Somalia and other Muslim-majority nations.

On Thursday, ahead of the president's most recent visit to Minneapolis, a number of Somali residents were on edge, the Tribune reported. Community leaders told the newspaper that they were working with the FBI and had armed security guards monitoring Somali-owned businesses. Citizens, namely Muslim women with hijabs, were also advised to be watchful.

"When it's happening in your own town and city it is more close to home than when it's somewhere far," Minnesota Democratic State Rep. Mohamud Noor, whose district includes Minneapolis, told the Star Tribune. "So we are trying to temper the fear that exists in the community."

During the rally, Trump's anger with Omar was apparent as he scolded the crowd for electing her. Earlier this year, Omar and three other minority Democratic congresswomen were targeted by Trump in a racist tweet that went on to inspire a rally chant of "Send her back!" directed at the first Somali-American congresswoman.

"I know the people of Minnesota," Trump said Thursday. "How the hell did that ever happen? How did it happen?"

The president proceeded to highlight Omar's recent controversies, again ripping her over her comments about Israel and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"How do you have such a person representing you in Minnesota?" Trump said. "I'm very angry at you people right now."

About 20 minutes later, Trump turned his attention to Minnesota's Somali community. He touted his administration's efforts to reduce refugee resettlement and warned that having Democrats in power would lead to "unvetted, uncontrolled migration at levels you have never seen before."

"In the Trump administration, we will always protect American families first and that has not been done in Minnesota," the president said. He added, "We will not make the mistakes made in European countries and allow a violent ideology to take root in our country on our shores, we're not going to allow it to happen."

Trump's remarks drew cheers from rally attendees, but critics on social media were outraged.

"Can you imagine being Somali-American and watching this?" one person tweeted. "This is the kind of hate rally seen in authoritarian and fascist countries."

Another wrote that the president's comments "were stunning in ugliness & tone."

While Omar has yet to specifically address the president's comments on Somali refugees, she retweeted a former Minnesota state representative who pointed out that Trump supporters have been responsible for making death threats against her and for mailing bombs to Democrats.

Somalis in Minnesota, however, had a more direct response to Trump: They plan to get him back at the polls, the Sahan Journal, which covers immigration and refugees in the state, reported.

"The only thing I know for certain is that I will not vote for Trump," Ibrahim Dahiye told the Journal. "I know he hates us."

This article was written by Allyson Chiu, a reporter for The Washington Post.
https://www.bemidjipioneer.com/news/nat ... -Minnesota
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 11, 2019 3:25 pm

Adam Klasfeld


BREAKING: Federal judge BLOCKS the Trump administration's "public charge" rule change on immigration.

Background from earlier this week, @CourthouseNews: https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-sk ... g-welfare/
Image

From the accompanying 24-page opinion, which I am uploading now:

The current interpretation of "'public charge' has been accepted for over a century" and those challenging the rule change -- including @NewYorkStateAG and @MaketheRoadNY -- are likely to succeed on the merits."
[img]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EGndRRzXUAEc_Cl.png‏[/img]

INBOX: @NewYorkStateAG James reacts, "Once again, the courts have thwarted the Trump Administration’s attempts to enact rules that violate both our laws and our values, sending a loud and clear message that they cannot rewrite our story to meet their agenda."

Image
Look out for my story coming up on @CourthouseNews.

Meanwhile, read the 24-page opinion here.

When covering the hearing on the public charge rule earlier this week, I wrote that it looked like a "bloodbath."

This held up nicely.

Just a blistering, blistering ruling against the government.


@KlasfeldReports
5-minute recess.

Generally, one can’t predict a case by a judge’s pointed questions and remarks at oral arguments.…



Judge also deconstructs the government's "baseless" claim that non-English proficiency would make an immigrant likely to become a ward of the state.

“The United States of America has no official language,” Daniels noted.

Image
During oral arguments, the DOJ admitted that an immigrant being in a wheelchair could be a factor used against that person.

The judge reminded the government that it can't discriminate against people with disabilities, who can "live independent and productive lives."
Image

Judge Daniels expands upon what "America must endure" if this rule were to be enacted.

Just a brutal ruling, from a judge who ruled in Trump's favor in the past (the emoluments case).
Image
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/sta ... 8328832000
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Re: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 20, 2019 1:45 pm

Feds Admit 1,250 More Immigrant Children Were Separated From Parents
BIANCA BRUNOOctober 18, 2019
SAN DIEGO (CN) – The federal government likely separated an additional 1,250 immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border before formally announcing its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, a Health and Human Services official told a federal judge Friday.


Tears run down the face of Naomi Liem, 10, of Franklin Park, N.J., on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 26, 2018, during a protest against immigrant families being split up. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Health and Human Services Cmdr. Jonathan White told U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw he believes a “final accounting” would show at least 1,250 additional kids have been separated from their parents before Sabraw issued an injunction stopping the family separation practice.

The additional separations will likely be confirmed before an Oct. 25 deadline set by Sabraw in the expanded family separation class action he’s presiding over in the Southern District of California.

The government had 6 months to account for all additional families it separated after a report by the Office of Inspector General this past January raised the alarm that thousands more children may have been separated than previously thought.

The American Civil Liberties Union also alerted the court this summer about hundreds more families that have been separated despite Sabraw’s order ceasing the practice. The government had separated those families due to parental criminal history for minor crimes including misdemeanors.

The ACLU has asked Sabraw to find those separations violate his preliminary injunction order, but the judge has not yet ruled on the matter. He indicated Friday he expects to issue a decision within a couple weeks.

White said Friday the review process for 11 different data sets cross-referenced by several immigration agencies would be completed within a week.

Sabraw noted the process of reuniting the newly separated families is likely to be more arduous than the first time around.

Steven Herzog – who heads the steering committee of law firms and nonprofits working to reunite separated families – confirmed most of the parents have been deported to Guatemala and Honduras.

“It’s going to be more challenging to track them down than the initial group of 471 parents who were deported without their kids,” Sabraw said.

Herzog said a group of nearly 100 attorneys have made more than 4,200 phone calls to parents and sponsors in their reunification efforts for the 868 children of possible new class members that have so far been identified.

About 436 sponsors and 225 parents have been reached.

Only 23 parents have been located in their countries of origin so far, Herzog said.

ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said they will likely need governmental assistance this time around to locate all the parents who have been deported.

“There needs to be a conversation of whether there is anything the government can do to help the process given what we’re looking at. I think we are going to need more resources,” Gelernt said.

A status conference in the case is scheduled for Nov. 8.
https://www.courthousenews.com/feds-adm ... m-parents/
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