baby jail
scandal? fail? //Katrina?
congrat primary 719 on trump ctr protestors; ice agent secret FB page vile, threat to throw burritos
SEE CRUEL SADISM
SEE HOMAN
FOR NOW INCLUDE ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ
merri ok
see mass deportation
see privatization
bizzarely/predictably doubled down and reinstated before 2018 midterms.
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trump 2025 pjt promise reboot?
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MMA 8 25
Inside the alliance between right-wing media and Trump “Border Czar” Tom Homan
As the public recoils from “Alligator Alcatraz” and Trump’s mass deportation agenda, conservative outlets work overtime to help Homan mislead their audiences
Written by John Knefel
Research contributions from Tyler Monroe
Published 08/07/25
When Harris Faulkner concluded a recent interview with Tom Homan — President Donald Trump’s “border czar” tasked with carrying out the administration’s mass deportation operations — she did so with a benediction.
“God bless you, Tom Homan, for keeping us safe,” the Fox News anchor said solemnly.
Fox host Jesse Watters took a different, more threatening approach when he demanded that Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), who is Guatemalan American, “acknowledge” that “no other country is as great as the United States,” and “if she doesn't, I'm calling Homan — she's going home.”
The devotion that Faulkner and Watters show to Homan is hardly unique in right-wing media. More than any other figure in Trump’s inner circle save perhaps deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homan is the person conservative outlets turn to when they need someone in Trump-world to champion the administration’s increasingly unpopular immigration policies.
According to a Media Matters review, Homan has appeared on Fox News 78 times this year and an additional 20 times on Fox Business, making him the most frequent Trump administration guest on the Fox networks since Trump's inauguration. But his reach in conservative media extends far beyond those appearances.
Over the month of July, right-wing media fawned over Homan in interviews, aiding him in manufacturing false narratives about widespread migrant crime and encouraging him to threaten so-called sanctuary cities with increased raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Conservative interviewers also ignored or downplayed horrific conditions at a Florida immigrant detention camp known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” including allegations that detainees had been subjected to overflowing toilets, food filled with worms, and had been chained to the ground. A whistleblower just came forward describing “inhumane conditions” at the facility. These interviewers simultaneously offered Homan a platform to wildly inflate the number of so-called criminals and “national security threats” that ICE had arrested.
This dynamic illustrates the symbiotic relationship between Homan, who had his own lucrative career as a conservative pundit and consultant, and the right-wing media ecosystem — where each party has an incentive to demonize immigrants, ignore critical reporting, and create narratives about social disorder that they attribute to immigrant communities, all in the service of Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
“God bless you, Tom Homan”: Right-wing media’s month of softball interviews with Trump’s border czar
On July 1, a day before officials at Alligator Alcatraz began concentrating people in the encampment, Homan appeared on Charlie Kirk’s influential podcast.
Video
Citation
From the July 1, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble
“Tell us about the significance of Alligator Alcatraz,” Kirk began. “What is it and what will it be used for?”
After Homan offered his standard anti-immigrant boilerplate to plead on behalf of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Kirk responded: “You’re doing a wonderful job.”
“We have your back, Tom Homan,” Kirk said at the conclusion of the interview, calling for “10 million deportations” after Homan promised to “flood the zone with sanctuary cities,” declared “zero tolerance” for those who impede ICE operations, and defended ICE personnel (“They’re not Nazis”).
Appearing on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom on July 7, anchor Bill Hemmer asked Homan about the new facility in southern Florida and whether other states might be willing to open similar sites. Homan took aim at people who opposed the administration’s approach, complaining that blue states are “too busy attacking ICE and they’re too busy attacking Trump’s policies,” referring to a shooting at an immigrant detention facility in Texas on July 4. Hemmer responded: “On that point, could this get ugly?” It was his only follow-up question.
Homan had a busy following day. Fox News’ Martha MacCallum interviewed him and didn’t ask about Alligator Alcatraz. Neither did Newsmax’s Greg Kelly, though the host found the time to shower Homan with praise, saying “you guys are on fire,” and “nobody knows the law better than you.” (Kelly also incorrectly stated, “Habeas corpus is great, but I don't think it applies to an illegal alien,” echoing a larger right-wing media campaign to suspend due process protections for immigrants.) Fox Business host and former Trump adviser Larry Kudlow introduced Homan by calling him “one of my great heroes.” Kudlow also didn’t bring up Alligator Alcatraz.
Homan has appeared on Fox News 78 times this year and an additional 20 times on Fox Business, making him the most frequent Trump administration guest on Fox by far
On July 10, Fox anchor John Roberts asked Homan three questions, all about sensational but unrepresentative examples of immigrants committing acts of violence. “There could be more, and that’s truly frightening,” Roberts said to conclude the segment.
:{Kirk hosted Homan for a VID]
lengthy, in-person at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit on July 12. “The great Tom Homan,” Kirk said by way of introduction. “The legendary Tom Homan.” During their interview, Kirk declared that “we need to get rid of birthright citizenship” and claimed that “the legal Hispanics” support mass deportation. (A Gallup poll from July 11 found 91% of Hispanic Americans support a pathway to citizenship, and only 23% support deporting all immigrants without legal status.)}:
Alligator Alcatraz didn’t come up during a July 11 interview on Fox & Friends or a July 16 interview on Hannity. Newsmax host Rob Schmitt also failed to bring up the facility in his interview with Homan, though he began the segment by accusing the administration’s opponents of throwing “every possible sob story at you guys.”
On July 18, Fox Business guest host Cheryl Casone began her interview with Homan by asking about the administration’s stated goal of reopening Alcatraz prison in San Francisco as a migrant detention center before shifting her focus to its namesake in southern Florida, suggesting it might serve as a template for other states.
“What do you make of this idea of these other states that could do something similar to what they’ve done in Florida, which is Alligator Alcatraz,” Casone said. “I mean, this facility was created very quickly, and many lawmakers have been down there. They said that it is safe. You know, all of these Democrats yelling and saying it was going to be dangerous — it’s not.”
Video
Citation
From the July 18, 2025, edition of Fox Business' Mornings With Maria Bartiromo
That was the same day that Fox News’ Faulkner blessed Homan at the end of her interview. Alligator Alcatraz went unmentioned.
Homan was back on Hannity on July 21, during which the eponymous host asked him three questions, all of which centered on — and inflated — the risk of so-called migrant crime. Two days later, Homan was on another Fox prime-time show, this time The Ingraham Angle, appearing over a chyron that read: “Illegals’ reign of terror.”
Video
Citation
From the July 23, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
The next afternoon on America Reports, Roberts’ questions again gave Homan a chance to criticize sanctuary city policies. The anchor concluded the segment by reminding his audience that Homan had “vowed to flood the zone there in New York City” with ICE agents.
On July 29, Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones framed Homan and ICE as dispassionately following the law. “There’s laws on the books you guys have to enforce,” Jones said, adding later, “You don’t get to selectively enforce when a judge has signed an order, right?” (The Washington Post found that the second Trump administration has defied more than 1 in 3 judicial rulings, including in high-profile cases regarding immigration and deportation.)
Homan uses right-wing media to spread false talking point that 70% of ICE arrestees are criminals, the rest are “national security threats”
A closer look at one of Homan’s latest talking points helps illustrate how the right-wing media ecosystem seeks to bolster support for Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
In the July 29 Fox & Friends interview, Homan claimed that “70% of the people we are arresting are criminals. Hard stop: 70%.”
“Who are the other 30%?” Homan continued. “The other 30% are national security threats.”
He reiterated later: “We’re arresting 70% criminals, and the rest are national security threats and those with final orders.”
Homan didn’t offer a citation for those figures, and Jones didn’t ask for one. Neither did NewsNation anchor Markie Martin, who interviewed Homan the same morning.
Video
Citation
From the July 29, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
“Seventy percent of everybody we arrest is a criminal,” Homan repeated later that day on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. “Who is the other 30%? National security threats, final orders of deportation, gang members.”
Note the rhetorical slippage, as Homan moves from an unequivocal statement that 30% of people detained by ICE are national security threats to squishier phrasing that also includes immigrants with an order of deportation.
Over the next 48 hours, Homan made nearly identical versions of the claim on Newsmax’s The National Report, Fox Business’ Varney & Co., and OAN’s Real America with Dan Ball. None of these programs offered even mild pushback, much less the full debunking the claim deserves.
Homan’s first claim that 70% of ICE arrestees are criminals appears to have first been used in a Department of Homeland Security press release from June 26, which quoted DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin as saying: “Under the Trump Administration 70% of illegal aliens arrested have been convicted or charged with a crime beyond illegally entering our country.” The figure has been included in at least seven subsequent releases.
Even granting Homan the benefit of the doubt in his failure to distinguish between a criminal conviction and a charge, the DHS stat appears to be incorrect, according to media reports and other independent sources that cite ICE’s own data.
On June 24, CBS News reported that “federal statistics show nearly half — or 47% — of those currently detained by ICE lack a criminal record and fewer than 30% have been convicted of crimes.”
The Associated Press, citing ICE data, reported that “as of June 29, there were 57,861 people detained by ICE, 41,495 — 71.7% — of whom had no criminal convictions.” Of that subset, 14,318 people had pending criminal charges, meaning that about 53% of arrestees either had a criminal conviction or pending criminal charges.
According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects government data, 24% of ICE detainees were facing criminal charges as of July 13 and 28% had a criminal conviction, though TRAC adds: “Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations.”
Even the scant evidence in the public record that purports to bolster Homan’s claim undercuts the Trump administration’s larger argument that it’s targeting the so-called worst of the worst.
On July 16, CBS News reported that “of the estimated 100,000 people who were deported between January 1 and June 24 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 70,583 were convicted criminals, according to an ICE document” obtained by the network — though “most of the documented infractions were traffic or immigration offenses.” (It’s not clear what accounts for the discrepancy between the CBS News report and other publicly available data.)
As to Homan’s second claim that the remaining 30% of ICE arrestees are “national security threats,” it appears to be the product of the Trump border czar’s own imagination. The statistic doesn’t appear in any DHS press releases from this year, and doesn’t seem to exist in the public domain beyond Homan’s own claim. Although Homan occasionally tempers his talking point by including people with removal orders, the message to conservative audiences is clear, as illustrated by the NewsNation headline: “Border czar says ICE arrests include 70% criminals, 30% threats.”
Citation
From an article published on NewsNation on 7/29/25
Using TRAC’s most recent numbers, ICE is holding 56,816 people — meaning that by Homan’s reasoning, more than 17,000 are national security threats. By contrast, the July 16 CBS News report found that “3,256 of the more than 100,000 people removed were known or suspected gang members or terrorists,” which is roughly 3%. (Databases that purport to list terrorists and “gang members” are also notoriously inaccurate and filled with false positives and other errors.)
Homan’s baseless assertion that 30% of ICE arrestees are national security threats — including people who simply have an order of removal — functions as a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that won’t be challenged in right-wing media. The Trump administration has absurdly claimed that unauthorized migration amounts to an “invasion.” Working backwards from there, Homan apparently concludes that any person in the United States without legal status is therefore a matter of national security.
This hall of mirrors, where regular people going about their lives are transformed into violent threats to community safety, inverts the actual dynamics at play. Right-wing outlets that serve as platforms for Homan to demonize immigrants are actually putting communities at risk, and now their coverage has helped lay the foundations for ICE and the Florida Division of Emergency Management to open a remote detention camp in southern Florida rife with abuse.
Cascading reports of horrific conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”
Right-wing media have amplified Homan’s fearmongering even as they have largely ignored or downplayed the harms ICE is causing throughout the country, as embodied most viscerally at Alligator Alcatraz. That campaign of ignorance notwithstanding, the public has had access to horror stories from the southern Florida facility virtually from its first hours of operation.
Officials began holding people at the facility on July 2, and by July 4 reports of harsh living conditions were already starting to emerge. NBC 6 Miami reported the encampment faced swarms of mosquitos, heavy downpours, and high temperatures, all of which were standard fare for the remote area of southern Florida. The outlet later spoke with a detained man who said there was “no water here to bathe,” that the fluorescent lights were always on, and that the food, which detainees were given once a day, “has worms in it.” Another person held there had been denied his medication.
On July 9, The Miami Herald published a lengthy investigation into Alligator Alcatraz, reporting that detainees had no access to showers or water with which to flush the toilets, that giant bugs had breached the tent walls, and that temperatures whipsawed between freezing cold and swelteringly hot. Many of those details were subsequently confirmed by The Associated Press, which added that there were “flooding floors with fecal waste,” and The Washington Post, which reported that some detainees had been “shackled to a bench.”
Conditions only deteriorated from there. On July 22, NBC News reported a man held at the facility had developed fungus on his feet from the standing water and overall poor sanitation. The same day, The Guardian cited immigration advocates who claimed at least six people sent to the facility had been hospitalized. WLRN Public Media spoke on the phone to a migrant in the camp, who said guards “chained me to the ground,” forced him to stand in the sun without water from 1-7 p.m., and “called him the n-word.”
Lawyers and immigration advocates for the detainees have sued in federal court, alleging that the Trump administration and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have created a legal black hole where the ultimate jurisdiction for the facility is deliberately opaque. “This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,” the plaintiffs argued. Detainees there have reportedly gone on hunger strike, though DHS denies the claim. Videos show ambulances entering and leaving the facility repeatedly over the course of several days.
In short, Alligator Allcatraz is operating as an extrajudicial concentration camp designed to disappear and punish immigrants largely outside formal legal processes. If Tom Homan and his MAGA media allies have their way, it won’t be the last. DeSantis has already suggested his state will soon unveil a second detention camp, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the government is looking to open similar facilities in Arizona, Nebraska, and Louisiana. On August 5, Noem announced a second camp would be opened in Indiana, dubbed the “Speedway Slammer.”
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AN 4 25 PROTESTS? maryland fr
'Mommy no!' Watch the moment ICE agents smash window to arrest mother in front of daughter
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an 3 25
Private prison companies in the United States can hardly contain their excitement as the Trump administration moves to revive the practice of detaining migrant families at facilities with records of horrifying abuses, a decision that advocacy groups say highlights the White House's disdain for human rights as it carries out its large-scale assault on immigrants.
"Reopening family detention facilities with devastating histories of abuses, trauma, and long-term psychological damage underscores that cruelty is the point of these Trump administration policies," Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement Thursday after CBS Newsreported the administration's moves.
According to CBS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—newly empowered by President Donald Trump—"was detaining the first group of migrant parents and children" on Thursday "in a detention facility in Texas designed to hold families with minors."
"The group includes three children," the outlet added, citing an internal government report.
Separately, NBC Newsreported Thursday that "U.S. immigration agents are planning a new operation to arrest migrant families with children as part of a nationwide crackdown."
"During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and border czar Tom Homan said that plans for mass deportations would initially focus on migrants who had committed crimes," NBC observed. "The new plans for national operations show that many of the families and children to be targeted do not have criminal histories."
As part of the revival of family detention—which was used by the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, and largely ended by the Biden administration—immigration officials are "refitting" two Texas facilities, including the notorious detention center in Dilley, Texas.
CoreCivic, a private prison company, has been newly contracted by ICE to reopen the facility for family detention.
"I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career," Damon Hininger, CoreCivic's CEO, told investors last month.
George Zoley, executive chairman of the GEO Group, said last week that "we've never seen anything like this before," referring to the speed with which the Trump administration is moving to procure contracts for migrant detention.
The New York Timesreported Friday that "a GEO Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million to Republican PACs that accept unlimited donations, with the bulk going to groups that supported House Republicans and Mr. Trump."
"It is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."
The Detention Watch Network noted that while the Dilley center was "in operation for family detention, there were reports of foul water and negligent medical treatment, with hospitals confirming that children are consistently released with health issues they dubbed 'Dilley-ish.'"
"In 2018, a 19-month-old girl, Mariee, tragically died after leaving the facility, and in 2019, a guard was accused of physically assaulting a 5-year-old," the organization said.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote earlier this week that he visited the center in December 2018 and "it was horrifying."
"The cruelty and abuse of Trump's family detention policy is a lasting stain on our nation," Merkley wrote on social media. "I'm calling on the admin to reverse this decision—in no world should this facility reopen."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, said Thursday that "it is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."
"Detention is harmful and traumatic for everyone, but especially children," said Ghandehari. "Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community with support services provided and facilitated by local community-based groups—never Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that is plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence."
"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment," Ghandehari added. "Family detention, like all immigration detention, is inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary. Everyone, certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability."
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baby jail tap dance, trafficking BS
an 12 24
As part of an interview with the executive director of America’s Voice, Greg Sargent claimed that Donald Trump confidante Alina Habba used word games during a recent Fox News interview to disguise the president-elect's real plan for dealing with the families of undocumented migrants.
In a transcript from his New Republic "Daily Blast" podcast, Sargent asked Vanessa Cardenas to dig into Habba's defense of the first Trump term when migrant families were torn apart as they were put in detention centers, denying it had ever happened, and then asserting it would not happen after he is sworn in next January.
Speaking with the Fox host, Habba, recently appointed by Trump as counselor to the president, complained, "Nobody is breaking up families. Nobody is targeting individuals and making sure that one over the other goes out. That doesn’t happen under President Trump. It didn’t happen before. But you do not have a right to come here to endanger us or to not come in here the right way."
She then added, "I can assure you, [Trump 'border czar'] Tom Homan, as tough as nails as he is—he’s looking out for us, and child trafficking is something he’s spoken about extensively. And that is why he wants to get families, if they will cooperate, out and in the right way."
According to Sargent, Habba's mention of "families" being forced out and given a chance to come back in was a tipoff.
Calling it "spin," he asked his guest, "Habba clearly is trying to say, 'Don’t worry, you won’t see families separated like during Trump’s first term.' But then she gives away the game at the end saying we’re going to have to 'remove entire families.' Your thoughts?"
Cardenas admitted, "It sounds like they are rewriting their whole script."
"We all remember the family separations that occur; we all remember the kids in cages; we all remember the kids that were forced to be removed from their parents’ arms. And that was not something that we imagined. It’s something that actually happened, and that’s why the American public revolted against those policies," she continued before adding, "The last piece of evidence for that is people like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, who are obviously key figures in the Trump administration, have the intention and the desire, and they have been very clear about their plans to target as many people as possible. Tom Homan, in previous interviews, have said things like no one is off the table, meaning that they’re going to deport anyone that they deem should not be here. From what we have heard, it’s pretty much undocumented immigrants, period."
You can read more here.
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rww 11/04/2024
by
- David Gilbert and Vittoria Elliott @ Wired: In Pews Across America, Evangelicals Are Told That God Wants Donald Trump
The weekend before the election, one Pennsylvania pastor told congregants that hosting Elon Musk weeks earlier was “phenomenal.” In Nevada, another dressed as a garbageman while urging his flock to vote Trump.
- Stephanie McCrummen @ The Atlantic: This Just in From Heaven
What a growing pro-Trump Christian movement tells viewers of its premier news show.
- Kathryn Post @ Religion News Service: Charlie Kirk's TPUSA opens a new front in 'spiritual warfare' on Christian campuses
Since 2020, TPUSA chapters have appeared at more than 45 Christian colleges or universities, at least 35 of them affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the largest association of Christian schools.
- Angry White Men: ‘There’s Gonna Be Some Crying Little Babies’: Andrew Isker Defends Trump’s Deportation Plan
On their Contra Mundum podcast, white, Christian nationalists Andrew Isker and C. Jay Engel defended Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants, even at the cost of separating immigrant families. Isker remarked that in order to ensure U.S. citizens aren’t killed by immigrants “there’s gonna be some crying little babies.”
- Kat Abughazaleh @ Mother Jones: Watch Fox News Melt Down Over Wives Voting Independently
Mother Jones creator Kat Abughazaleh argues that Watters’ reaction reveals the fierce undercurrent of sexist resentment coursing through this year’s campaign, typified by Donald Trump, who just this week ominously vowed to protect women, “whether the women like it or not.”
- Maurício Alencar @ The Daily Beast: Neo-Nazi Influencer Nick Fuentes Now Says ‘Trumpism Is a Cult’
Neo-Nazi personality Nick Fuentes has ridiculed Donald Trump for dressing up as a garbage man, despite once being one of his most outspoken supporters and former dinner guests. In a rant on his channel, the white nationalist streamer said MAGA was indeed a cult.
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~ baby jail?
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an 4 23
“significant” number of children who were U.S. citizens were separated by the Trump administration from their parents, a result of the then-president’s broader “zero-tolerance” anti-immigrant polices created to send a message to migrants in Central America to not travel to the United States or risk their families being permanently destroyed.
“A government task force is tracking the fates of U.S. citizen children taken from migrant parents during the Trump administration. Some have spent years in foster care,” The New York Times revealed in a bombshell report Tuesday. “Hundreds, and possibly as many as 1,000, children born to immigrant parents in the United States were removed from them at the border, according to lawyers and immigrant advocates who are working with the government to find the families.”
Just as with the more than 5000 immigrant children the Trump administration separated from their families who the Biden administration has been actively working to re-unite, some of the 1000 children who are U.S. citizens have also yet to be reunited with their families.
“In many cases, the U.S.-born children were placed into foster care for lengthy periods, and some have yet to be reunited with their parents, lost in the system nearly five years after the separations took place.”
The Trump administration built what many called concentration camps to house the thousands of migrant children it had taken from their parents, as Trump administration attorneys argued in court the children did not need soap or toothbrushes.
The Times notes, “anyone wronged by the United States can bring claims against the government, and many families are doing so with the help of the A.C.L.U. as well as other groups and private lawyers.”
attorney Leecia Welch, deputy litigation director at Children’s Rights, told The Times, “When you think it can’t get any worse, you hear additional facts about the horror of the policy.”
That child separation policy was created and promoted by White House Senior Advisor to the President Stephen Miller, a far-right extremist who “promoted white nationalist literature, pushed racist immigration stories and obsessed over the loss of Confederate symbols,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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baby jails
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/12/corecivic-defamation-lawsuit-family-separation-simon/
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1220
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computer sys did not talk diff depts; top vet/admin lied to DHS head K? about capability; even when had chance to reunite, did not, purpose delay
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-contributor-tom-homan-intellectual-father-family-separation
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mma 1120
Following the report that lawyers say they can’t reunite 545 children separated from their families at the border as part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policy, right-wing media have defended the president, asserting that critics of the policy are misstating or lying about the facts behind its origins and implementation.
However, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy was unique to his administration in that it was a deliberate plan designed to deter migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. by separating parents from their children. The policy was designed to punish families for migrating, and was infamously crafted by white nationalist-linked Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller. According to a new internal investigation, U.S. attorneys told top Justice Department officials at the time that they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare, but they were rebuked.
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ref https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-twist-facts-defend-trumps-child-separation-policy-lost-track-545
NBC News reported last week that lawyers say they can’t reunite 545 children separated from their families at the border as part of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policy. The policy has been widely criticized as inhumane, and Trump himself attempted to blur the lines of responsibility and soften the reality of what his administration did when he was questioned about it at a presidential debate. Right-wing media has dutifully backed him up, insisting that critics are misrepresenting the policy or lying about the facts behind its origins and implementation.
NBC News’ Julia Ainsley and Jacob Soboroff reported on October 20 that lawyers appointed by a federal judge to reunite families that the Trump administration separated at the U.S.-Mexico border have been unable to find the parents of 545 children, and that “about two-thirds of those parents were deported to Central America without their children.” Trump’s administration has tried to dispute criticisms of the child separation policy; a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said that the “narrative has been dispelled,” and White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern claimed that many parents “have declined to accept their children back.” When the topic was brought up at last week’s presidential debate, Trump sought to deflect responsibility, arguing that former President Barack Obama’s administration pursued similar policies.
However, Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy was unique to his administration in that it was a deliberate plan designed to deter migrants from seeking asylum in the U.S. by separating parents from their children. The punitive motivations for the policy, which was infamously crafted by white nationalist-linked Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, have been made clear through reporting behind the decision. According to a new internal investigation, U.S. attorneys told top Justice Department officials at the time that they were “deeply concerned” about the children’s welfare, but they were rebuked. Trump’s then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to a participant’s notes, said in a meeting that “we need to take away children” so that people won’t seek amnesty out of concern for their families. Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also reportedly emphasized that it did not matter how young the children were -- according to The New York Times, “He said that government lawyers should not have refused to prosecute two cases simply because the children were barely more than infants.”
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, spoke to NBC News about the administration’s various explanations:
Responding to the administration’s statements, the ACLU’s Gelernt said, “First, we have not even found these 545 parents so neither we nor certainly the administration can know whether they want to be reunited.”
“Second, in the past there have certainly have been parents who have made the agonizing decision to leave the child in the U.S. because of the danger the child would face upon return. The humane and simple solution is for the Trump administration to allow the parents to return to the U.S. to reunite with their children but the administration is not allowing that.”
Speaking to The New York Times, Gelernt also addressed Trump’s attempt to blame past administrations for the policy during the October 22 presidential debate:
“The fact is no other administration, Democrat or Republican, has ever systematically separated children,” Mr. Gelernt said. “The Trump administration’s actions to systematically separate children is unprecedented and what made that much more horrific is that there was no age limit. Even babies and toddlers were separated.”
On MSNBC, Soboroff also rebuked Trump’s defenses following the debate, noting that the policy “meets the U.N. definition of torture.”
Despite the recent reporting on the policy’s origins, a bombshell internal investigation by the DOJ inspector general, and widespread condemnation from human rights organizations, right-wing media have towed the line on defending the cruelty behind the policy, boosting the defenses put out by the administration, and attacking Trump’s critics.
- Fox host Tucker Carlson defended the policy by arguing that parents are “refusing to reunite” with their children after being separated and complained that if we “let anyone with a child gain immediate access to this country,” then “we would be flooded by millions of new people."
- [vid]
- breitbart complained that the “500 missing migrant children narrative” was raised at the debate “despite the facts,” calling it an “out-of-nowhere claim” and citing a DHS spokesperson’s tweet calling the story “wholly inaccurate.”
- Townhall editor and Fox News contributor Katie Pavlichargued that child separation was an Obama administration policy that was started in 2014 and continued by the Trump administration.
- On Fox & Friends Weekend, Fox News contributor and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan pushed back on criticisms of the policy. Co-host Will Cain introduced the segment by saying that Biden “looked to pin the Obama administration’s failed policies on President Trump.” Homan said that he gets “angry every time they push a false narrative” about the administration’s policy, disputed Trump’s reference to ICE keeping children in “cages,” and argued that the policy was put in motion by the Obama administration.[vid]
- theDaily Caller boosted DHS’s defense that “this narrative has been dispelled,” claiming: “Deported parents of migrant children who remain in the U.S. don’t want to be reunified with their children.”
- The Washington Examiner similarly echoed DHS’s claims in an article titled:“'Dispelled on several occasions': DHS pushes back on reports lawyers can't find parents of children separated at border.”
- BlazeTV's Glenn Beck attacked the parents of children who were separated,asking, "What parent allows a child to stay in government custody instead of coming home?”
- White nationalist sympathizer Michelle Malkin tweeted:
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biden debate cites new report 525 lost, dhs lied about trying to beep track alpha #
https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-claims-parents-are-refusing-reunite-their-children-after-being
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/border-officials-separated-an-asylum-seeker-and-her-newborn-then-called-themselves-heroes/
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omg
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/president-trump-is-the-child-trafficker-in-chief/
President Donald Trump thinks of himself as a champion against human trafficking. He addressed a White House Summit on the issue in January claiming there was a “humanitarian crisis” at the border fomented by criminal organizations and that “traffickers victimize countless women and children.” He signed an executive order and diverted $400 million in funding to combat the issue, boasting in his usual manner that “we have signed more legislation on human trafficking than any other administration has ever even thought about.” But in recent months, the administration has been found to be flouting the United States’ own anti-trafficking laws by deporting thousands of children and families seeking asylum, practically delivering them into the hands of traffickers across the border in Mexico.
Dr. Amy Cohen, executive director of Every Last One, explained to me in an interview that under the Trump administration’s so-called “Remain in Mexico” program, “the United States has been essentially feeding vulnerable migrant children and families to cartel traffickers in Mexico continuously.” The program, officially known by the Orwellian-sounding title of “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), sends immigrants seeking entry into the United States across the border to Mexico to await the adjudication of their cases. While the Department of Homeland Security claimed that MPP would “decrease the… ability of smugglers and traffickers to prey on vulnerable populations,” in fact it does the opposite.
Cohen elaborated on this horrific phenomenon, saying, “migrants are dropped off with nothing on the other side of the border, with no shelter, with no protection, with no food, with no money. And within minutes, they are picked up by cartel gangs that are waiting.” As a child and family psychiatrist who works closely with traumatized migrant children, she did not mince words, saying that families are, “kidnapped and used for extortion, which is a form of trafficking. Sometimes they are tortured. Sometimes they are raped. Children are compelled to watch. Sometimes children themselves are raped.”
The only way to view the outcome of this policy is that the United States is actively participating in a trafficking operation. The Trump administration cannot claim ignorance of the outcome of MPP. According to Cohen, “This is happening in cities literally all along the border. This is not a secret; this is widespread.” So extensive is the abuse that according to her, “The vast majority of asylum seekers who we’ve placed into the MPP program have at one time or another experienced at least one, sometimes multiple, episodes of what I would consider trafficking, of kidnapping, and some form of psychological or physical torture."
because of the extreme danger that the Trump administration has put families in, according to Cohen it has “forced many parents into a decision” about whether to keep their children with them or send them unaccompanied across the U.S. border.
But under cover of the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government has accelerated the expulsion of even unaccompanied children to Mexico and Central America—in violation of federal law. The Associated Press explained that “More than 2,000 unaccompanied children have been expelled since March under an emergency declaration enacted by the Trump administration, which has cited the coronavirus in refusing to provide them protections under federal anti-trafficking and asylum laws.”
Now reports have emerged of the government hiring a private security and transportation firm to move immigrant families and children into hotels in the United States before expelling them. According to the New York Times, which broke the story, the Trump administration has created “a largely unregulated shadow system of detention and swift expulsions without the safeguards that are intended to protect the most vulnerable migrants.” Children, some as young as one year old, are being cared for in hotels like Best Western and Hampton Inn by private security personnel who have no childcare training.
Cohen says advocates like her believe that “this has been a way for the United States to try to hide a number of these children who they are deporting.” Those children held in government facilities have to be registered as having entered the United States, which then triggers legal protections for them. But by holding children in hotels, effectively off the books and out of public view, “government attorneys are denying that they are actually in the custody” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, says Cohen. Bizarrely, they are claiming that the children are in the custody of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) over concerns of COVID-19, and thereby flouting the legal mandate known as the Flores Settlement to maintain the safety, care, and oversight of the children.
Where the children end up once they are removed from the U.S. is not known, and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency will not say. According to Reuters, “Between April and June, U.S. officials arrested more than 3,300 unaccompanied children on the southwest border, but CBP has declined to say how many have been expelled under the new process or give a breakdown of arrests by nationality for that time period.” During that same time frame, out of the thousands of children apprehended, only about 160 remain in U.S. custody.
It is ironic, to say the least, that some of Trump’s most loyal followers are conspiracy theorists who label themselves QAnon claiming that the president is facing off against a “cabal of Democratic pedophiles.” So mainstream is this movement that one of its followers just won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia. QAnon is now appropriating the social media hashtag #SaveTheChildren and promoting fantastical claims of a widespread child sex trafficking ring. Its followers have even joined the anti-trafficking movement in the United States. But they have entirely ignored the very real trafficking and exploitation of children at the U.S. border that their president has unleashed.
More than two years ago, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed that the government cared about children when he officially announced Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, saying, “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.” It was a thinly veiled attempt to punish those fleeing poverty and violence for a better life in America. And while mass public outrage forced Trump to back off (he signed an executive order in June 2018 to end what his own discretionary policy initiated), in truth the torture and trauma facing immigrant families did not end. It was simply moved out of our view across the border into even more dangerous conditions.
As America hurtles toward November 3 with a desperation unlike any we’ve felt for previous presidential elections, the issue of how President Trump has treated immigrant families and children has been largely off the radar. But if we care about children and about protecting them from horrific torture and abuse, Trump’s role as Child-Trafficker-in-Chief ought to be central to our election discourse.
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strict father punishes/corrects disobedient kids? in baby jail max pain/fear of losing child a deterrent; but also preserves hierarchy thus power
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-and-white-evangelical-christians-are-bonded-by-sadism/
john s eb
there’s still too much confusion over the president’s bond with white evangelical Protestants (WEPs). I suppose there will always be as long as outsiders presume that Donald Trump’s strongest supporters believe in loving thy neighbor as thyself. Once you see that WEPs do not apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally, things become clearer. Once this Christian concept is removed from the discussion, “paradoxes” melt into the air. What’s left is a natural alignment of political interests.
How do I know WEPs don’t truly believe in the Golden Rule? From life experience. I know what I’m talking about. All you have to do is listen carefully, however, and know what to listen for. Elizabeth Dias wrote a big piece in the Times last week trying to clear up the “contradiction” of WEPs standing by Trump “when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.” A source explains helpfully that there’s no contradiction at all.
“The years of the Obama presidency were confusing to her,” Dias wrote of her source. “She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.” The source: “I do not love Trump. I think Trump is good for America as a country. I think Trump is going to restore our freedoms, where we spent eight years, if not more, with our freedoms slowly being taken away under the guise of giving freedoms to all. Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.”
This makes no sense to outsiders. Freedom for “gay people and members of minority groups” is not taking anything away from anybody. This makes no sense, because outsiders do not generally accept a worldview in which power is ordered. First God, then man, then woman, then child. White over nonwhite. Heterosexual over LGBTQ. Christian over non-Christian. When you believe with your whole being that power is ordered according to God’s will, “giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups” is not political equality, as outsiders would often see it. It’s knocking you out of the order of power. It’s taking something away. Equality is literally theft
when political equality is theft, you cannot apply the Golden Rule universally and unconditionally. If you did, you’d be complicit in a crime. The Golden Rule demands white people share power with nonwhite people. It demands husbands share power with their wives. Neither can ever be done.A wife, according to the same source in Dias’ reporting, must “submit” to her husband in accordance with God’s law. If she does not, she’s trying “to rule over him.” Same for whites and nonwhites. If white people are not at the top of the order, they are being ruled over. This is why Dias’ source says that, “Caucasian-Americans are becoming a minority. Rapidly.” The more for “them,” the less for “us.” They believe Trump prevents that from happening.
They believe Trump is “restoring their freedom.” Utter nonsense. What they are really saying is that the president will prevent people lower down the order of power from achieving more freedom and equality, “violating” their “freedom.” He must do that by any means, even if he confiscates kids from their mothers, bans a world religion, orcommits treason. None of that matters as much as maintaining the supremacy of a religious identity built on sand.And make no mistake: this is a religious identity. These are very real anti-democratic Christians hostile to critical thinking, modernity, pluralism, and all forms of equality. “It’s almost like it is a reverse intolerance,” a WEP source told Dias. “If you have somebody that’s maybe on the liberal side, they say that we are intolerant of them. But it is inverse intolerant if we can’t live out our faith.”[ // reverse disvrimination]
If WEPs believed in the Golden Rule, they’d never tolerate other people’s pain. They do tolerate it, however. Indeed, they like it. It feels good to see the president “restoring their freedom.” When WEPs say they want to “live out our faith,” what they mean is sadism is and should be a natural consequence of the natural order of things in which God’s people are chosen to rule in God’s name. “Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is,” Dias wrote. “They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are.” That’s correct, but take that to its logical conclusion. His enemies are their enemies. His pleasures, their pleasures. Their bond is far from a contradiction. It’s an alignment of political interests in which sadism is the point.
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jails (pvt?) covid spreaders (super?)
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/this-is-child-abuse-ice-held-migrant-kids-as-young-as-age-1-at-hotels-before-deportation/
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/kirstjen-nielsen-is-trying-to-cover-up-the-horrors-she-enacted-at-dhs-with-a-barrage-of-lies/
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an 720
MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff revealed a conversation he had with an aide to Vice President Mike Pence in his new book “Separated: Inside an American Tragedy” that gives a disturbing glimpse of the kinds of people working in the Trump administration.
Soboroff has been one of the most dogged reporters pursuing the story of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy, and his new book centers on the administration’s horrific decision to systematically separate thousands of migrant kids from their families as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. This policy caused widespread chaos, trauma, and harm that continues to this day.
At one point in the book, as revealed on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Monday night, Soboroff confronted Pence staffer Katie Miller, who had been a spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security during the crisis.
“My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids, I will think about the separations differently,” Katie Miller, who later married Trump’s infamously anti-immigrant staffer Stephen Miller, told Soboroff. “I don’t think so. DHS sent me to the border to see the separations myself to try to make me more compassionate, but it didn’t work.”
AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER
“It didn’t work?” Soboroff said, noting he was “exasperated.” “I will never forget what I saw. Seriously. Are you a white nationalist?”
Most people, asked that question, would be horrified and offended. But what was Miller’s reply?
“‘No, but I believe if you come to America, you should assimilate,” she reportedly responded. “Why do we need to have ‘Little Havana?'”
It’s a jarring response. First, the idea that anyone in government would respond to the question “Are you a white nationalist?” by saying, “No, but…” is galling enough on its own. But her further explanation is even more baffling. Whatever you feel about finer points of immigrant assimilation patterns and cultural habits in the United States, it’s hard to see how they could at all be relevant to the cruelty of tearing kids away from their parents and imprisoning them, often in cruel conditions.
The fact that she connects her reaction to this cruelty with her feelings about Little Havana shows exactly who she is. But then, so does the fact that she married Stephen Miller.
Watch the clip below:
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an 620
Unpublished watchdog report exposes the continuing horrors of Trump’s family separation — 2 years laterGabe O
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an 1219 docs arrested
Doctors protest border officials’ ongoing refusal to give detained kids and families flu shots
How Trump’s child separation policy unequivocally violated international law: expertAndrea Germanos / Common Dreams
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Trump administration jailed ‘unprecedented’ 69,550 migrant kids in past year: report
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Placing children in harm’s way’: Report details how Trump policy put 13,000 kids in camps
A new report from Reuters on Friday revealed that President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies have sent 13,000 children—including over 400 infants—to tent cities on the Mexican side of the southern U.S. border…
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/border-patrol-decried-for-trying-to-kidnap-us-citizen-kids-and-use-them-as-hostages-catch-and-deport-their-parents/
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https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/07/institute-index-cashing-child-abuse-border
INSTITUTE INDEX: Cashing in on child abuse at the border
By Sue Sturgis July 5, 2019
Under federal law, maximum number of days children captured after crossing the border into the U.S. without authorization are allowed to be held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection before being transferred to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR): 3
Number of weeks some migrant children were held at a border station in Clint, Texas, where visiting lawyers found filthy and overcrowded conditions: 3
Date on which an asylum-seeking father and daughter from El Salvador, trapped in a holding camp in Mexico because of the Trump administration's "metering" policy of limiting the number of asylum claims it will process per day, drowned while crossing the Rio Grande: 6/23/2019
Number of migrant children who've died in U.S. custody so far this year: 6
Percent by which the number of children in ORR custody grew in the first two years of the Trump administration due to its aggressive and unprecedentedfamily separation policy: 400
Month in which immigrant rights advocates won a major victory by shutting down the notorious Tornillo detention camp for children in the Texas desert: 1/2019
That same month, factor by which the Trump administration increased the number of children in custody at the ORR shelter in Homestead, Florida, which has been described by critics as a "prison camp": almost 2
Value of the tax break Comprehensive Health Services, the Florida company that co-manages the Homestead facility, got from the state in July 2017: $600,000
Five months before receiving the tax break, amount the company paid to settle a medical fraud claim brought by the U.S. Justice Department: $3.8 million
Value of the contract that Virginia-based defense contractor General Dynamics got to provide training and technical assistance at the Homestead facility: $1.6 million
Year in which the investment firm D.C. Capital Partners purchased Comprehensive Health Services and three other companies to form Caliburn International LLC: 2018
Month in which Caliburn announced plans for a $100 million initial public offering of stock, promising growth because of Trump's immigration policies — plans it withdrew after negative press coverage: 10/2018
Month in which former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a former adviser to D.C. Capital Partners, joined Caliburn's board of directors: 5/2019 ()
In a victory for the movement to end migrant child detention, date on which North Carolina-based Bank of America, Caliburn's chief financier, announced it would no longer work with operators of immigrant detention centers and private prisons: 6/26/2019
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maybe lack of outrage on the right is fear of BROWN BABIES?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/race-against-time-how-white-fear-of-genetic-annihilation-fuels-abortion-bans/
no lnx
Race against time: How white fear of genetic annihilation fuels abortion bans
Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1152002639 WILKES-BARRE, PA - AUGUST 2, 2018: A group of Trump supporters display their "Women Q "save the children" For Trump" and "Keep America Great" signs during the "Make America Great Again" rally held at the Mohegan Sun Arena.]
written by Carla Bell / YES! Magazine July 5, 2019
Last year, White people constituted 60% of the U.S. population, down from about 90% in 1950. It’s projected that by 2050, they will be the new minority and people of color will be the majority—a nightmarish prediction to some White people.
Sen. Lindsey Graham voiced his concern of a demographic dilution at the 2012 Republican convention, when he said, “The demographics race we’re losing badly … [Republicans are] not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
Graham’s comments relay what social scientists and antiracism activists call “White Extinction Anxiety,” or “Fear of White Genetic Annihilation.”
The idea that White people could “go the way of the dinosaur” has been dismissed by some as simple pity of personal circumstance or conspiracy theory, but the convergent effects of new laws banning abortion together with old laws promoting mass incarceration of Black and Brown people suggest that this White fear is not just an idea, but the catalyst for public policy.
There indeed appears to be a strong correlation between demographic projections, the fear of White genetic annihilation, and the recent wave of abortion bills.
Antiracism activist and diversity trainer Jane Elliott described it as a fear so great that White people, including political leaders, “will do anything to see that doesn’t happen.”
Hyper-punitive abortion legislation recently passed in Alabama bans the procedure outright except in cases of risk to a woman’s health, and in Georgia a woman who obtains an abortion will spend the rest of her life in prison. Of 212 lawmakers in Alabama and Georgia whose votes ushered in the most restrictive abortion laws we’ve seen yet, 211 are White.
What drives all of this is nothing as philosophical as religion. It’s not faith. It’s not principle. It’s the fear of genetic dominance of Black and Brown people.
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619 lawyer academic inspector told (no precedent0 to go to press with clinton tx conds
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/keep-yelling-democratic-rep-ayanna-pressley-shouts-down-protesters-while-exposing-abusive-migrant-camps/
also AOC (did not feel safe w/ guards, laughed at them?)
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/heres-the-shocking-amount-of-money-private-companies-are-making-from-detaining-immigrants/
no lnx grafs vid
Here’s the shocking amount of money private companies are making from detaining immigrants
written by Jen Hayden / Daily Kos June 26, 2019
A new report from NBC News has detailed the enormous cost of housing the children and families being detained at the border. Are you sitting down? Because a for-profit, private company is billing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services a whopping$775 per child, per day to hold them in one of the “tent cities” on the Trump administration’s orders.
Professor W. Warren Binford, a law professor who is an “internationally recognized children’s rights scholar and advocate” and founder of the Willamette’s Child and Family Advocacy Clinic, visited a Border Patrol detention facility in Clint, Texas,and she told PBS and several other media outlets about the squalid conditions these children are living in—sleeping on concrete floors, children taking care of toddlers, flu outbreak, diapers being reused or no diapers at all. Separated from their loved ones at the border as they turned themselves in to seek asylum and legal entry into the United States. This is a crisis entirely manufactured by the Trump administration as Professor Binford notes that nearly every child she interviewed had a family member in the United States willing to take them in and care for them.
Almost none of the children that we interviewed had come across the border themselves alone.
Essentially, they came across the border with family. And they are trying to be reunited with family who are living in the United States. Almost every child that I interviewed had family, parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, siblings here in the United States who are waiting for them and are ready to care for them.
Instead they are being held in these facilities for an endless amount of time. How in the world is this fiscally responsible? Republicans are laser-focused on “responsible spending” and we can’t give health care to low-income residents because we must prove how we will pay for every penny in advance. But shelling out $775 per child, per day? They don’t bat an eye. To show you how utterly ridiculous this spending truly is, especially when these children could be released to waiting relatives desperate to see these kids again, I checked into rates at Trump’s D.C. hotel. On the random dates I checked (September 4-6, 2019), the room rate was $395. Throw in a breakfast package and we are looking at $415. These children could be staying in luxury hotels, ordering room service and we’d still be paying half the daily fee. THINK ABOUT THAT! And yet, we are told there isn’t even a budget for these children to have toothpaste, soap, mattresses, bed linens, or diapers. We are paying $775 per day, per child, to hold them in abusive, neglectful situations.
If you are asking yourself why the U.S. government is doing this, well, let’s follow the money.
Alexandria Ocasio-CortezAOC
Reminder: Caging kids is a for-profit enterprise, & the people who profit off camps finance the political campaigns of those who legislate more caging.
If you want to follow the money: GEO Group & CoreCivic are big ones. Look at the lenders & private equity grps they deal with. https://twitter.com/joycewhitevance/status/1143161956309884928 …
Joyce Alene
$775 per day, per kid & it doesn’t even cover a toothbrush, soap, a bed. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/trump-admin-s-tent-cities-cost-more-keeping-migrant-kids-n884871 …
The ACLU has a brief, but informative, video below about the GEO Group in particular, which makes $1.6 billion per year from government contracts.It is not coincidence whatsoever that private prison companies like GEO Group donate heavily to Republicans and Donald Trump. Their investment is paying off nicely for them at the expense of children dying and living in squalid conditions.
Here are some data points and graphics from OpenSecrets.org that tell the story.
Here’s a stunning graph showing the contribution trends of these for-profit companies and their record of donating to politicians. As you can see, they opened the taps to Republicans over the last three years and boy is it ever paying off for them!
We are paying Donald Trump and Republican party donors billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars to abuse these children and families, even though their own families are waiting for them. They have no interest whatsoever in processing these asylum claims in a timely manner. In fact, they’ve made it harder to process claims, allocating fewer resources. So, immigrants pile up at the border, Donald Trump gets to keep feeding red meat to his racist followers with a crisis of his own making, Fox News gets to keep their ratings up with a new “immigration scare,” Republicans cash those private prison checks and see their base motivated to come to the polls. It’s a win-win for Republicans, but a loss for humanity.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/from-ghettos-to-concentration-camps-the-battle-over-words/
HNN
"What’s in a name?,” Juliet famously asks in Act II of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For Juliet, the answer is perfectly obvious: nothing. It should not matter that her sweetheart Romeo is a Montague and she a Capulet, feuding families in the strife-riven city of medieval Verona. “Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet assures Romeo. He could cease to be a Montague, he could cease even to be Romeo, and he would remain her beloved. “O! Be some other name: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Juliet’s answer is difficult to square not only with the ultimate fate of the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s play but also with the controversies that frequently attend the application to someone or some thing of a highly charged label. We tend to think we have minimized the scope of disagreement when we boil a debate down to semantics. The reality is that so many of our cultural arguments manifest as arguments over words, over what they mean, how they are used, and who gets to define them.
The past week has offered yet another reminder of this truth. On Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fiery left-wing freshman Democrat from New York, blasted the Trump administration on Twitter for creating “concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.” Her description of immigration detention centers as “concentration camps” precipitated a riposte from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who, likewise in a tweet, scolded Ocasio-Cortez for betraying the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust with her choice of words. The days since have seen further sharp exchanges on this issue, as politicians from opposing sides of the aisle, op-ed columnists, Jewish organizations, cable news journalists, and, of course, the Twitterati on the right and the left have weighed in on whether the “concentration camp” designation is appropriate or misplaced.
This is far from the first time the usage of a term with Holocaust associations has provoked a backlash. Some of the same arguments that are now being made to rebut the labeling of detention facilities as “concentration camps” were trotted out in the past to resist the naming of segregated African American neighborhoods as “ghettos.” In 1964, the American Jewish intellectual Marie Syrkin wrote, “In the immediate as well as historic experience of the Jews the ghetto is not a metaphor; it is a concrete entity with walls, stormtroopers, and no exit save the gas chamber.” Syrkin penned this jab at the transference of the word “ghetto” from Jews to African Americans at a time when the black referent for the term was only beginning to become mainstream. Yet, nearly three decades later, the American Jewish author Melvin Jules Bukiet expressed the same pique. In April 1993, on the eve of the gala opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Bukiet published an editorial in the Washington Postthat was bitingly critical of the museum, which he judged a well-intentioned but insidious attempt to absorb the Holocaust melting-pot style into a vocabulary of American politics and culture and to sap it of its Jewish specificity. “Something similar,” he wrote, “has also begun to happen with other elements of the Jewish tradition. Take the word ‘ghetto,’ which is commonly used as a synonym for slum. A ghetto is a an enclosed, preferably walled-in, domain within a city, and despite the invisible walls around Harlem, there is no barbed wire across 125th Street and there are no guard towers.”
Both of these attempts to limit the word “ghetto” to its Holocaust meaning skipped over the fact that, prior to the Holocaust, the term had a long history of being used to refer to both coercive and non-coercive Jewish quarters. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. The ghettos of the early modern Italian peninsula were compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish spaces, and while they were kept under round-the-clock surveillance, there was no “barbed wire,” which had yet to be invented; nor were there “guard towers” (which may have been a feature of some Nazi concentration camps, but were likewise absent in Nazi ghettos). Even after the original mandatory ghettos disappeared with the legal emancipation of Western and Central European Jews, the term “ghetto” was resurrected near the turn of the twentieth century to refer to densely packed but voluntary Jewish immigrant neighborhoods such as London’s East End, New York’s Lower East Side, and Chicago’s Near West Side. Moreover, over the course of the nineteenth century, “ghetto” came increasingly to be used especially by Jews as a metaphor for an old-world, traditional Jewish society and mentality believed to be disappearing.
One argument that has been made on the left to defend Ocasio-Cortez — which she herself has now adopted — is that the term “concentration camp” also has a history that predates (and coincides with) the Holocaust. It first became prominent during the Second Boer War from 1900 to 1902, when it was applied to the internment camps established by the British in South Africa. Later, in the 1940s, it was widely used in discussing the American internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. The difficulty with this argument is that it is clear that Ocasio-Cortez intended to mobilize memory of the Holocaust by appropriating a term that, since 1945 at least, has become indelibly associated with the destruction of European Jewry. The day before her tweet that went viral, she posted an Instragram video where, in addition to using the word “concentration camps,” she invoked the slogan “Never Again,” which is commonly used to refer to the importance of remembering the Holocaust. By 1945, the term “ghetto” was sufficiently venerable and versatile in its signifying capacity that efforts to reserve it for the Holocaust were unsuccessful. The label “concentration camp” did not have a similarly long history of changing and contested meanings. While academics may continue to employ the term to designate the general phenomenon of camps in which people not guilty of a crime are interned by the state, in the popular lexicon today, “concentration camps” cannot be used without effectively conjuring the Holocaust.
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intercept on looking glass
The emails confirming the protest surveillance were released in an ongoing freedom of information battle that the American Immigration Council, or AIC — in collaboration with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, the National Immigrant Justice Center, Kids in Need of Defense, Women’s Refugee Commission, and Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP — is waging to pry documents surrounding family separation from the government.
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EJ
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/trump-administration-to-house-immigrant-children-by-toxic-dump/
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New Reports Reveal Trump's Horrifying Family Separation Policy Was Even Crueller Than We Knew
By Matthew Chapman, AlterNet
The "zero-tolerance" policy wasn't just cruel. It was poorly planned. READ MORE»
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/jeff-merkley-trump-family-internment-camps
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-admin-officials-destroyed-records-immigrant-kids-separated-their-parents
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As the Movement to Abolish ICE Gains Mainstream Support, Fox News Goes into Attack Mode
Fox has long led the media charge to defend ICE and its actions, frequently using the violent gang MS-13to demonize all immigrants.
By Bobby Lewis / Media Matters June 30, 2018, 5:41 AM GMT
Fox News is scrambling in response to the grass-roots movement to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has begun seeping into mainstream progressive and Democratic politics. On the evening of June 28, all three of the network’s prime-time shows aired segments attacking the Abolish ICE movement, as did Fox & Friends the next morning.
As the Trump administration is stepping up mass deportations, separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border, and interning immigrant children in cages, calls to abolish ICE have spread from a grass-roots Twitter phenomenon to the political mainstream. Multiple candidates for prominent elected positions have endorsed the movement, including New York congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who ran on the issue leading up to her upset primary win over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY). Elected Democrats are also beginning to endorse the movement. In the House, three Democrats support abolishing ICE and a fourth, Rep. Mark Pocan (WI), introduced legislation to abolish ICE and investigate possibilities for “a humane immigration enforcement system.” And in the Senate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) endorsed abolishing ICE, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said, “We need to probably think about starting from scratch.” Even some ICE agents themselves have called for the agency to be dissolved.
Meanwhile, on Fox, the network’s stars were allied in their defense of ICE. After a brief update on the June 28 mass shooting at an Annapolis, MD, newspaper, Tucker Carlson -- who uses his platform to promote white nationalism -- opened his show by denouncing #AbolishICE as an “ideological revolution on the left” and fearmongering about the criminals and drugs that he claimed would flood the country without ICE.
Sean Hannity suggested that members of “the left” are attacking ICE because special counsel Robert Mueller has produced “literally zero evidence that the president ever did anything wrong” in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, causing progressives to “unravel.”
Laura Ingraham complained that “Occupy ICE protesters want to, again, make it impossible for our immigration investigators to do their jobs.” And she ridiculed protesters in Washington, D.C., who were calling for abolishment of ICE as “Jiffy Pop” on account of the “tin foil robes” they wore, which were intended to resemblethe foil blankets ICE is giving detained children.
And Acting ICE Director Tom Homan appeared on Fox & Friends, his favorite safe space, using the Annapolis shooting to argue that anti-ICE protesters “should be respecting law enforcement across the board,” including ICE agents. Homan also said the protesters “need to educate themselves” about ICE’s activities and that they are seeking “better rules for illegal alien families than we have for U.S. citizen families.”
Fox has long led the media charge to defend ICE and its actions, frequently using the violent gang MS-13to demonize all immigrants. (ICE also mislabels some immigrants as gang members in order to deport them.) Along with the hosts’ efforts, guests on the network lie and mislead about immigration issues to defend the agency’s critical role in President Donald Trump’s agenda of implementing mass deportations.
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Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Tuesday doubled down on the widespread overreaction to a few mild protests of members of President Donald Trump's administration, this time drawing an absurd comparison to the "racist South."
"When you get crowds of people around an individual... if they feel another person is subhuman, I mean, we saw this in the racist South," she said. "People were considered subhuman, and they felt like they could do anything to black America."
She continued: "And now, you get the sense that we're in that really scary place now. That, to me, is terrifying."
It's not clear why Ingraham thinks protesters see Trump officials as "subhuman." In fact, holding someone responsible for the lies they tell and the cruel policies of their administration only makes sense if one sees that person as human.
Of course, the whole line of argument is self-refuting on its face. After a barely disruptive incident in which she was asked to leave a restaurant because her presence made the staff uncomfortable, press secretary Sarah Sanders will now reportedly be receiving Secret Service protection.
The people Ingraham is comparing to the slave and sharecroppers subject to a violent regime of white supremacy are actually a part of the ruling party in charge of running the most powerful government in the world.
In other words: they're not victims.
What's notable, of course, is who Ingraham and her ilk don't think are victims. She didn't seem to think that the immigrant children ripped away from their parents after only being accused of a misdemeanor were victims — instead, she said the detention centers in which they were imprisoned were "essentially summer camps."
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rick-scott-gave-600k-tax-break-child-detention-camp-engaged-fraud
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https://www.alternet.org/some-trumps-biggest-donors-are-profiting-big-time-immigration-detention-centers
no lnx
Some of Trump’s Biggest Donors Are Profiting Big-Time on Immigration Detention Centers
The plan to lock-up asylum-seeking migrants may seem like it happened overnight, but it has been years in the making.
By Jen Hayden / Daily Kos June 20, 2018, 1:51 AM GMT
The giant retail stores being converted into detention centers and these large tent cities cropping up to house immigrants, where did they come from? As always, it is important to follow the money. This plan to lock-up asylum-seeking migrants may seem like it happened overnight, but it has been years in the making. Only weeks after Donald Trump put his filthy hand on Lincoln’s Bible and took the Oath of Office, this was the February 24, 2017, headline at CNN Money:
The actions Donald Trump, his sycophant Stephen Miller and Minister of White Supremacy Jeff Sessions are taking today are a huge payoff to the prison lobbyists and the border security industry that spent millions helping to get Donald Trump elected. Private for-profit prison executives were furious that President Obama decided to end the practice of using private prisons. They poured everything into Donald Trump and his campaign, maxing out $250,000 donations and even helping Trump raise $100 million in sketchy, secret money for his “inauguration committee.” And it paid off, as one of the first decisions from the Trump administration was to rescind Obama’s order to phase out private prisons.
They didn’t stop there. These groups have been spending lavishly at Trump’s private business as well. The Miami New Times noted the private prison company GEO Group was one of the newest big spenders at Trump’s Doral property in Florida.
The GEO Group private-prison bash. Private-prison-company stock was cratering at the end of Barack Obama's time in office after his Department of Justice announced the federal government would no longer work with private, for-profit prison operators. But the Trump administration rapidly rolled those rules back after taking power. Then Boca Raton's GEO Group, the second-largest private-prison firm in America, moved its yearly company gathering to the Trump Doral.
At the core of it all, there are two factors that dovetail together when it comes to the immigrant detention centers: corruption and white supremacy. In fact, these are the core elements of the Trump administration overall.
In March of 2017, then Homeland Security chief John Kelly told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that he was considering a plan to separate families and detain them.
"We have tremendous experience of dealing with unaccompanied minors," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on "The Situation Room." "We turn them over to (Health and Human Services) and they do a very, very good job of putting them in foster care or linking them up with parents or family members in the United States."
It didn’t take long for Kelly to publicly walk back that statement, denying he meant it would be a cruel, intentional warning or deterrent to others who might be thinking of seeking asylum in the U.S. But we can clearly see now, they’ve been plotting this for quite some time. The sadistic, racist voices appear to have won over Donald Trump as we can clearly see he approved this action in April 2018, when he sent his attorney general out with a public statement and then began snatching children from their parents at the border.
Later in 2017, NPR highlighted the big money to be made from putting migrants and their children into detention centers. Money siphoned from our tax dollars to pay for their private profit cruelty.
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The Trump administration wants to expand its network of immigrant jails. In recent months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has called for five new detention facilities to be built and operated by private prison corporations across the country. Critics are alarmed at the rising fortunes of an industry that had fallen out of favor with the previous administration.
And those facilities weren’t going to fill themselves, now were they? A former detainee told NPR about his stay in one of these facilities:
Menjivar says he was raped by gang members in his cell, and when he reported it to the medical staff they mocked him. ICE found the rape allegation to be unsubstantiated. His lawyer has filed a federal civil rights complaint.
Menjivar also says he was forced to work for a dollar a day.
"Lots of things happened to me in Conroe," he says.
Anne Chandler is the executive director of the Houston-based nonprofit Tahirih JusticeCenter, which assists migrant women and children and she explained in Texas Monthlyhow these many of these asylum-seekers have tried to cross the border legally to apply for asylum, only to be turned away. The border patrol has closed the bridge used for legal entry. They are forcing illegal entry, funneling people to arrests. In that same interview, Chandler notes that many of these families actually seek out border patrol agents to turn themselves in because they want to start the process to apply for asylum. They don’t want to cross illegally, they had no other choice.
TM: Even if they crossed at a legal entry point?
AC: Very few people come to the bridge. The border patrol are saying the bridge is closed. When I was last out in McAllen, people were stacked on the bridge, sleeping there for three, four, ten nights. They’ve now cleared those individuals from sleeping on the bridge, but there are hundreds of accounts of asylum seekers, when they go to the bridge, who are told, “I’m sorry, we’re full today. We can’t process your case.” So the families go illegally on a raft—I don’t want to say illegally; they cross without a visa on a raft. Many of them then look for Border Patrol to turn themselves in, because they know they’re going to ask for asylum. And under this government theory—you know, in the past, we’ve had international treaties, right? Statutes which codified the right of asylum seekers to ask for asylum. Right? Article 31 of the Refugee Convention clearly says that it is improper for any state to use criminal laws that could deter asylum seekers as long as that asylum seeker is asking for asylum within a reasonable amount of time. But our administration is kind of ignoring this longstanding international and national jurisprudence of basic beliefs to make this distinction that, if you come to a bridge, we’re not going to prosecute you, but if you come over the river and then find immigration or are caught by immigration, we’re prosecuting you.
TM: So if you cross any other way besides the bridge, we’re prosecuting you. But . . . you can’t cross the bridge.
AC: That’s right. I’ve talked to tons of people. There are organizations like Al Otro Lado that document border turn-backs. And there’s an effort to accompany asylum seekers so that Customs and Border Patrol can’t say, “We’re closed.” Everybody we’ve talked to who’s been prosecuted or separated has crossed the river without a visa.
It the end, this will not stop until we stand up and demand an end to this for-profit cruelty and beat back the white supremacists who are driving our immigration policies and enforcement. Let’s start by doing everything we can to reunite these families and then let’s carry our anger, our passion, our energy and our patriotism to the polls in November to change our Congress and take back this country.
[UDPATE] Bloomberg reports a Texas non-profit got a nearly $500 million contract to take care of the immigrant kids.
The Trump administration plans to pay a Texas nonprofit nearly half a billion dollars this year to care for immigrant children who were detained crossing the U.S. border illegally, according to government data.
The nonprofit, Southwest Key Programs Inc., is to be paid more than $458 million in fiscal 2018, according to the data -- the most among the organizations, government agencies and companies that run a detention and care system for immigrant children on behalf of the Department of Health and Human Services. Southwest Key has about a dozen facilities in Texas, including a site at a former WalMart Inc.store in Brownsville that has drawn attention from members of Congress and national news organizations.
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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing-media-are-rallying-defend-trump-administrations-inhumane-separation-families-border
Trump administration is separating immigrant children from their parents or legal guardians after they cross the border, with at least 2,000 children taken from their parents since April 19. The administration’s merciless and inhumane policy has spurred numerous heartbreaking stories, including reports of a breastfeeding baby who was ripped from her mother, a Honduran father separated from his family who took his own life, and children who are held in cages alongside strangers. Yet right-wing media figures have been quick to defend the policy and dismiss its inherent cruelty:
- Breitbart editor-at-large Joel Pollak justified separating families at the border, saying the Border Patrol facilities are "better than what they had." Pollak also claimed that ICE taking children from their parents and putting them in detention facilities is “just about caring for the kids.”
- Right-wing troll Dinesh D’Souza, who recently received a pardon from President Donald Trump, questioned whether immigrant parents are “the ones choosing to separate their families. Fox's Pete Hegseth defended the separations because the children get food and "soccer and video games." Hegseth also called images of detained children “quite compassionate,” and said the policy was “defensible.”
- Fox News’ Trish Regan argued that Trump is showing asylum-seeking families "tough love" by taking children away from their parents.
- Fox contributor Tammy Bruce called for White House press briefings to end after reporters confronted White House press secretary Sarah Sanders about the separation of families.
- Fox's Jesse Watters argued that the White House should "start ripping press passes away" from reporters who ask about families getting separated at the border. Watters also said that “some would say” that separation is “a more humane policy” than detaining the families together.
- In a series of tweets, Twitter troll Bill Mitchell aggressively defended the policy, accusing the media of focusing on “#FakeNews ‘concentration camps,’” complaining about the money spent to keep the children captive, suggested that many of the children are “not with their families at all - they are with smugglers” (only a very small percentage of cases involve smuggling and often a bona fide relationship between the child and adult is clear), and claiming, “President Trump is PROTECTING these children.”
- Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade downplayed “the so-called separation of kids and parents” at the border, arguing that the Democrats are using it to distract from the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the handling of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server and the Singapore Summit between Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
- Fox’s Ainsley Earhardt said that families are “choosing to be separated” by showing up at the border. She also argued that “you can't even really blame an administration” for the separation policy.
- Her fellow Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy said that “the part that is troubling” is not children being ripped from their parents, but the parents choosing to come to the United States in the first place. Doocy also argued that the cages some children are being housed in shouldn’t be called “cages” because rather they are “walls [built] out of chain link fences," and he defended family separation by suggesting the U.S. government spends a lot of money to “make sure that those kids wind up with all that stuff” that detention facilities offer.
- Fox & Friends repeated or referenced Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s lies about family separation throughout the June 18 broadcast. Nielsen initially claimed that separation wasn’t happening -- it is.
- Right-wing troll Mike Cernovich said that Trump was “keeping [children] safe in dorms,” and he accused former President Barack Obama of giving children “to human traffickers.”
- Fox host and Trump lackey Sean Hannity claimed that the policy of separation “took place in previous administrations” (neither the Obama nor the Bush administration separated families as a matter of policy). Hannity also accused the media of having an “obsession” with the “so-called policy of separating illegal immigrant families.”
- Fox’s Laura Ingraham called the “outrage” over the separation policy “hilarious,” complained about watching “our country try to contort itself into other peoples' cultures,” and excused the separations because the children have “entertainment, sports, tutoring, medical, dental, four meals a day, and clean, decent housing” even though their “parents irresponsibly tried to bring them across the border illegally.” On her Fox show, Ingraham called the administration’s child detention centers “essentially summer camps” and compared them to “boarding schools.”
- Sinclair's Boris Epshteyn choose not to editorialize on the cruelty of family separation itself, instead attacking the "discourse" around separation policy and claiming it is what's wrong with Democrats and media.
- Right-wing columnist Ann Coulter warned the president not to fall for “these child actors weeping and crying on” cable news.
- Radio host Rush Limbaugh called the outrage over family separation “an entirely manufactured crisis” and claimed “it happened during the Obama administration” too (it didn’t).
- One America News Network correspondent and internet troll Jack Posobiec defended the policy by fearmongering that children crossing the border could be with traffickers as opposed to family members. There is clear evidence of the relationship between many of the children in detention and the adult that accompanied them.
- American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, a frequent cable news guest, contendedthat “Obama and Trump have same child protection policy” (they do not).
- Fox’s David Bossie attempted to shift the blame onto the parents, arguing that “if they don't become criminals, they're not separated.” He also claimed that Trump is just “following the law,” ignoring the reality that separation is a Trump administration policy, not the law.
- Fox host Tucker Carlson warned his viewers that people speaking up against America detaining children in cages just want to "change your country forever."
- Chris Bedford, editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller News Foundation, criticized the "hyperbole" over family separation and child detention.
- Drudge Report’s Matt Drudge attempted to paint Latin American children as violent by publishing a photo of children in Azaz, Syria.
- Turning Point USA spokesperson Candace Owens claimed that “these policies were in place” during the Obama administration (they were not).
- Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter aggressively defended the policy, suggesting that the U.S. ought to “separate the children and then send them all away” and “in prison (sic) the parents until they serve their sentence then throw them out.”
- Infowars frontman and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed that separation has been the “standard procedure for decades” when you “pick up a group of a hundred people and you have no idea who the hell they are.” Infowars also claimed that Trump had exposed “the hoax that the US is mistreating migrant children.”
- The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro fallaciously argued that Trump is simply “enforcing the law on the books.”
- Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk posted a series of tweets fearmongering about “illegal immigration” and claimed that “all of this happened for 8 years under Obama” (nope).
- NRATV host Dan Bongino claimed that reporting on the “immigration/children story” is “propaganda, nothing more” and argued that anyone who believed it is “delirious, and should seek professional help.”
- Radio talk show host Ben Ferguson shared an image on Facebook claiming that policies of separating children from “illegal parents” had been in effect since 2009 and that Democrats just started talking about the issue because “they only care about making Trump look ‘bad.’” The post has been shared over 100,000 times.
- Conservative commentator Dick Morris claimed that families seeking asylum at the borders were part of a “scam” in which adult immigrants were “abusers” who are using their children as a “battering ram to force their way into the country.” He also said the solution to this problem is to deny asylum to all immigrants who come to the border with a child.
- Fox New contributor and Townhall Editor Katie Pavlich posted a series of tweets comparing the separation of asylum-seeking families to the separation of children and arrested parents and supporting Sarah Sanders’ claims in which she portrayed “illegal aliens” as criminals who are responsible for separating U.S. families permanently by “committing murder or killing through drunk driving.”
- Conservative Review TV’s Jon Miller claimed that media are trying to push controversy around separation policies in order to “distract from the disastrous IG report and anything else this president has done that will cause people to vote for him.”
- Fox News’ Tomi Lahren tweeted that “we owe ILLEGAL immigrants NOTHING,” and suggestedthat family separation is just one of the “consequences” parents have to accept when they “drag [their] kids over here ILLEGALLY.
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mma no lnx
Everything right-wing media tried to blame for the Trump administration’s family separation policy
Blog ››› June 22, 2018 4:53 PM EDT ››› BOBBY LEWIS
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Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
As President Donald Trump’s administration implemented a new “zero tolerance” prosecution policy at the border that led to unprecedented and systematic separation of immigrant families and locking kids in cages, right-wing media flailed around trying to blame the administration’s policy on anybody or anything except Trump.
The president’s media enablers blamed Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, “the law on the book,” Democrats in Congress, the media, the families themselves, and even “the Illuminati of K Street” for the Trump administration’s policy:
Blaming the families themselves
Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt claimed that families “are choosing to be separated” by coming to the United States in the first place. Co-host Steve Doocy agreed, saying “the part that is troubling ... is the conscious decisions the parents are making” in trying to bring their children to America.
Recently pardoned felon Dinesh D’Souza rhetorically questioned whether the “deported aliens” were “the ones choosing to separate their families.”
Fox’s David Bossie said that if parents “don’t become criminals, they’re not separated” from their children.
Fox’s Tomi Lahren said, “If you do not want to be separated, do not cross the border illegally. Follow our laws, follow the process. That's the best way to ensure that your family stays together.”
Blaming former presidents
Radio host Rush Limbaugh claimed that family separation at the border "is an entirely manufactured crisis. It’s entirely manufactured. This has been going on for years. It happened during the Obama administration."
American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp declared, “Obama and Trump have [the] same child protection policy.”
Turning Point USA Communications Director Candace Owens falsely claimed that “these policies were in place” during the Obama administration.
Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk falsely stated, “All of this happened for 8 years under Obama.”
CNN commentator Ben Ferguson shared an image on Facebook that claimed that policies of separating children from “illegal parents” had been in effect since 2009.
Breitbart claimed Trump’s “new ‘zero tolerance’ policy worked during the presidency of George W. Bush,” referring to an initiative that began in 2005 and has not worked.
Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs stated that “previous presidents, including Bush and Obama, long ignored” family separation at the border until Trump “mov[ed] to stop” the practice.
Fox’s Sean Hannity claimed, “This is nothing new and took place in previous administrations as well.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said that family separation has been “standard procedure for decades” when you “pick up a group of a hundred people and you have no idea who the hell they are.”
Blaming a nonexistent law
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro fallaciously argued that Trump is simply “enforcing the law on the books.”
Fox’s David Bossie claimed that Trump is just “following the law,” ignoring the reality that separation is a Trump administration policy, not the law.
Fox host Sean Hannity also said that “it is the law.”
Blaming media, claiming they were using family separation as a distraction
Fox’s Brian Kilmeade said that Trump’s media detractors “had to reach for something else” after Trump “put a lot of the skeptics to bed … and they found it with the so-called separation of kids and parents.”
Rush Limbaugh claimed that media is inundating Americans with “manufactured crises” like family separation to distract from the Department of Justice inspector general report and strong economy.
Fox’s Tucker Carlson, host of one of the most racist hours on television, said that reporting on family separation is just the media pursuing their goal “to change your country, forever.”
NRATV commentator Dan Bongino claimed that media reporting on family separation is “propaganda, nothing more.”
Hannity accused the media of harboring an “obsession” with “the so-called policy” of separating children from their parents in order to mislead Americans.
Twitter troll Bill Mitchell predicted, “Every Sunday news show will be about Trump's #FakeNews ‘concentration camps’ and NOTHING about the OIG.”
Sinclair Broadcast Group’s propagandist Boris Epshteyn devoted his “must-run” segment on family separation to attacking the media for their “politically driven” attempts “to make it seem as if those who are tough on immigration are somehow monsters.”
Blaming Democrats, claiming they were using family separation for political ends
According to The Gateway Pundit, Democrats “would rather the problem persist so they can continue to wring their hands over another manufactured crisis to distract from the damning IG report and robust economy.”
Fox Business’ Stuart Varney complained that Democrats “hijacked” a hearing on the IG report “within seconds of it beginning,” and “poured out [their] scorn for President Trump” instead.
Fox’s Trish Regan commented that Democrats “would much rather cry on television like [Rep.] Elijah Cummings [D-MD] did” than stop family separation, because “it plays to any hatred they can gin up, as we go into ‘18, for Donald Trump.”
National Review’s David French wrote, “I have a feeling that for some partisans, it’s fascism to impose the policy and fascism to try to end it -- at least so long as the GOP is in charge of the process.”
Right-wing media are rallying to defend the Trump administration’s inhumane separation of families at the border
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