309 replies to this topic

[LFC]

We have to imprison piles and piles of immigrants because they're taking American jobs. We allow private companies to run many of those prisons. We also allow them to pay the illegal immigrants that they're imprisoning $1 a day to do jobs necessary to run the prison. The company gets to keep the profits. They also get former ICE officials in on the grift, almost immediately. Welcome to the "logic" of the GOP who represent profits, not people.

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In April 2018, Tracey Valerio, the top official in charge of “all agency contracting” at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, resigned. Within months, she was recruited as a paid expert witness in a lawsuit to defend ICE’s biggest contractor—a large, private prison and immigrant detention company known as the GEO Group.

The lawsuit charged Florida-based GEO with violating minimum wage laws by paying the same immigrants now being locked up in record numbers by the Trump administration as little as $1 a day for menial work such as cleaning toilets. That case and others like it threaten GEO’s profits.

But paying immigrants too little is hardly the only issue. Valerio, the top ICE contracting official who became GEO’s paid witness, not only went spinning through her agency’s revolving door, she was accused of violating the law and an agency rule in the process.

Moreover, Valerio turns out to be just one of a bevy of top officials to work for GEO and other private prison companies after throwing in the towel at ICE and the federal Bureau of Prisons, where government executives seem to form close relationships with the private companies they oversee on taxpayers’ behalf, only to accept lucrative employment with these same contractors later on.

[LFC]

The head of the Dept. of Homeland Security proves herself to be genetically incapable of taking responsibility, just like all the rest of the Trumpies.

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Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen skirted responsibility for the death of another migrant child in her agency’s custody by piling blame on those who advocate for “open borders” (Democrats) and the parents and caretakers who bring their children on the “long and dangerous journey” to the U.S. border.

In a statement released Wednesday, Nielsen called the death of 8-year-old Guatemalan boy Felipe Alonzo-Gomez a “deeply concerning and heartbreaking” “tragedy” and said she would enable more thorough medical screenings for children who are apprehended at the border.

She then launched into a diatribe concerning the uptick in illegal crossings in recent months, casting blame on a “system” that seemingly “rewards parents for sending their children across the border alone” and a broken asylum process as incentivizing factors in the increase in illegal traffic.

“Our system has been pushed to a breaking point by those who seek open borders. Smugglers, traffickers, and their own parents put these minors at risk by embarking on the dangerous and arduous journey north,” she said in the statement. “This crisis is exacerbated by the increase in persons who are entering our custody suffering from severe respiratory illnesses or exhibit some other illness upon apprehension. Given the remote locations of their illegal crossing and the lack of resources, it is even more difficult for our personnel to be first responders.”

By her own admission, it has been more than a decade since a child has died in the custody of Customs and Border Patrol. However, Nielsen suggested that children are just now facing “medical challenges and harboring illness caused by their long and dangerous journey.” She also suggested the “illnesses” were coming from Mexico’s side of the border.

[pnwguy]

LFC, on 28 December 2018 - 03:21 PM, said:

“medical challenges and harboring illness caused by their long and dangerous journey.”

Those two dead kids had SMALLPOX, I tell you. Q-Anon and InfoWars will start to uncover the consipracy. Hillary had Bill smuggle out some frozen specimens from NIH during his illegal presidency, and she's been working with George Soros to inoculate Central American asylum seekers terrorists before they arrive at the southern border.

[pnwguy]

pnwguy, on 28 December 2018 - 04:22 PM, said:

Those two dead kids had SMALLPOX, I tell you. Q-Anon and InfoWars will start to uncover the consipracy. Hillary had Bill smuggle out some frozen specimens from NIH during his illegal presidency, and she's been working with George Soros to inoculate Central American asylum seekers terrorists before they arrive at the southern border.

I forgot to mention that those two dead terrorists were kids, because they are part of Hillary's pedophilia ring. Soros opened a chain of pizzerias just south of the border.

[Traveler]

This seems to be the place to post this juicy tidbit.

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Federal and state investigators are scrutinizing the employment documents of immigrants without legal status who say they worked at President Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, according to their attorney.

Anibal Romero, a Newark attorney who represents five undocumented immigrants who say they worked at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, said in an interview Saturday that he met with investigators from the New Jersey state attorney general’s office and two FBI agents in November, before the workers began to go public with their stories.

Romero said he turned over fake green cards and Social Security numbers that supervisors at the golf club allegedly gave one of his clients, Victorina Morales, a 44-year-old Guatemalan national. He also gave investigators the pay stubs of Sandra Diaz, a 46-year-old Costa Rican native who now has legal status but said she was undocumented when she worked at the club for three years.

The FBI agents told him they would “coordinate” with the New Jersey state attorney general’s office, Romero said.

The materials collected by law enforcement agencies, first reported by the New York Daily News, indicate that investigators may be launching a probe into the hiring practices of the president’s golf club.

So how is that wall gonna help?

[baw1064]

LFC, on 28 December 2018 - 03:21 PM, said:

The head of the Dept. of Homeland Security proves herself to be genetically incapable of taking responsibility, just like all the rest of the Trumpies.

I recommend that the House make an apology from the Secretary a prerequisite for allocating funding for DHS.

[JackD]

Trump made the comment as well. An apology from either is unlikely.

[LFC]

Imagine, if you can, what the right-wingnut / Evangelical reaction would be if this was happening because of a Democratic priority.

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An historic Texas chapel stands in the way of President Trump’s proposed border wall, and some Senate Democrats are rallying to protect it.

In a Thursday letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, first obtained by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tom Udall (D-NM), and Martin Heinrich (D-NM) interrogate the administration’s plan to use eminent domain to seize land from border-town religious groups, despite the move possibly violating religious freedom.

“Eminent domain should not be involved in violation of any religious organization’s First Amendment right of free exercise of religion, Fifth Amendment right to just compensation for any public taking of private property, or the Religious Freedom Restoration act,” the senators wrote.

At the center of their argument is the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, which is currently battling the Trump administration over its its request to survey or seize its land for border-wall construction. The diocese has called the wall “fundamentally inconsistent with Catholic values” and warned that, in particular, Trump’s plans could limit access to or totally destroy the La Lomita chapel, a 153-year-old church widely considered the “heart of the community” in the border city of Mission, Texas.

That historic missionary church, located near a horseshoe bend in the Rio Grande separating the United States from Mexico, stands about 800 feet from the border.

“The federal government must exercise extreme caution when seizing private property, especially with respect to sacred sites like Lo Lomita Chapel,” the senators’ letter said. “The Trump Administration’s lawsuit against the Diocese raises important questions on the exercise of eminent domain to build a border wall and the impact it will have on religious organizations and American taxpayers.”

The Diocese of Brownsville—which has a hearing on Feb. 6 on their challenge against the government’s attempt to survey their land for possible construction—said on Friday that they are “pleased to see that members of Congress are concerned about the federal government's overreaching use of the power of eminent domain.”

“As the Diocese stated in its briefing to the court, and as the senators reiterated in their letter to Secretary Nielsen, the proposed border wall is fundamentally inconsistent with Catholic values,” said Mary McCord, senior litigator for the Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, who is representing the diocese. “The Diocese looks forward to seeing the Secretary's response to the congressional letter."

Bishop Daniel Flores, who has led the diocese since 2009, told The Daily Beast on Friday that the congressional letter gives him hope that their efforts are “being heard all the way in Washington”—all over the roughly 65 acres of land in dispute.

This is no shock. The Trump administration is attempting to perform a massive land grab the likes of which only right-wingnuts accused of Obama, Clinton, and any other Democrat of wanting. I wrote some time back that the National Butterfly Center caught government contractors tearing their land apart without any warning, authorization, and well before any money was allocated to even do it. Welcome to the jack work-booted thugs we warned about.

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Marianna Treviño-Wright, director of the National Butterfly Center, told the Texas Observer that she first noticed construction crews attempting to clear some of her land back in the summer of 2017:

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Marianna Treviño-Wright, director of the National Butterfly Center, said she was startled to find the work crew cutting down trees with a chainsaw and clearing swaths of vegetation with a brush mower along a road that follows a flood-control levee bisecting their property. Wright says the center has spent the last 15 years painstakingly restoring the 100 acres of former onion field into a habitat with flowers and trees for more than 200 species of butterflies.

“The supervisor of the work crew couldn’t produce any paperwork authorizing him to be there on our private property,” Wright told the Observer. “He told me not to talk to his crew and that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would be in touch, and then they left.”

The National Butterfly Center filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration a few months later.

[LFC]

Classic Trump: Make up something, declare it to be fact (multiple times), and then desperately demand that others prove it actually happened. This is what you get with a mentally ill individual who does not live in the real world.

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It’s become a staple of President Donald Trump’s riffs on the horrors of the US-Mexico border, something he knows so well that he doesn’t even need it scripted on a teleprompter: Human traffickers gag women with tape so they can’t breathe before packing them into vans and driving them across the border illegally.

But two weeks after Trump had started talking about tape-gagged women — when a January 17 Washington Post article had questioned the claim — a top Border Patrol official had to email agents to ask if they had “any information” that the claim was actually true.

The email, shown to Vox by a source within Border Patrol, was sent as a “request for information” by an assistant Border Patrol chief, apparently on behalf of the office of Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan (referred to internally as “C-1”). It asked agents to reply within less than two hours with “any information (in any format)” regarding claims of tape-gagged women — and even linked to the Post article “for further info.”

Vox’s source indicated that they and others in their sector hadn’t heard anything that would back up Trump’s claims, but wasn’t sure if agents in other sectors had provided information. However, no one from the Trump administration has come forward to offer evidence for the claim, either before or after the internal Border Patrol email was sent. (Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the border is built on a lie: the idea that the US-Mexico border is a lawless place where American citizens are constantly in grave danger, and where criminals are able to smuggle drugs and people without any risk of apprehension. That big picture — as Vox and the rest of the media has made clear again and again — bears very little resemblance to the truth.

But the claim about women gagged with tape and packed into vans has attracted particular attention because it’s quickly become a centerpiece of Trump’s rhetoric — according to the Post, as of Friday he’d made 10 references to it in 22 days — without anyone knowing exactly where he got it from.

Border experts have told the Post and other reporters that they’ve never heard of anything like what Trump is talking about.

But it’s extremely hard to prove that such things have never happened — especially because the president has access to classified information that experts speaking to journalists do not.

That’s where traditional fact-checking tends to run into a wall. While journalists might suspect that Trump is making things up, it’s possible that he’s just repeating something he heard in a briefing (or, less plausibly, read in an intelligence report) that wasn’t open to the public.

The internal Border Patrol email provided to Vox, however, makes that seem a lot less likely.

[LFC]

More Class Trump: In order to make a big, simplistic, showy splash for his mouth-breathing base he takes the government's eyes of the more important ball, in this case those who smuggle people over the border for profit. This is what you get, folks, when the leader is a petulant child with a grasp of policy that is based on reality TV shows and Faux News.

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In his quest to build a border wall, President Donald Trump has warned of jobs stolen from American workers, suburbs terrorized by criminal aliens, and desperate migrant caravans headed north. Lately, though, he has found a favorite new target in the “ruthless coyotes” and “vicious cartels” that smuggle migrants into the United States. “Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate — it is actually very cruel,” Trump said in his State of the Union speech. “Smugglers use migrant children as human pawns to exploit our laws and gain access to our country.”

Yet Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies have made America’s historically weak anti-smuggling efforts even weaker. Over the past two years, as smuggling networks have thrived, the Department of Homeland Security has shifted money and manpower away from more complex investigations to support the administration’s all-out push to arrest, detain and deport illegal immigrants. Hundreds of agents have been temporarily reassigned to low-level enforcement tasks like checking businesses for undocumented workers or locating foreigners who overstayed their visas. Some investigators’ travel has been curtailed, officials said; others have lost funds to pay informants.

In the first full fiscal year of Trump’s presidency, the number of new human smuggling cases launched by Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, the investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dropped from 3,920 to 1,671, a decline of almost 60 percent. Even more than in the past, the agency has focused its anti-smuggling efforts on low-level “coyotes” caught in the act of sneaking migrants into the country or transporting them inside the United States, current and former officials said. The Human Smuggling Cell, a special intelligence unit set up within ICE to support more ambitious migrant-smuggling efforts, has dwindled to less than half the staff it had in 2016.

[LFC]

WTF is this idiot doing now? He told America we needed to bring in bright, talented people to work here because there was a need. (Ignore the fact that he personally hires piles of unskilled foreign labor so he can pay less.) So what does he do? He makes it less likely these bright, talented people will come. This sounds so immensely stupid that it makes me wonder if Putin told him to do it.

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The Trump administration is putting into effect its plan to stop giving work permits to spouses of high-skilled visa holders, likely to be a tremendous blow to the tech industry.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, this would affect about 100,000 workers, most of whom live in California.

The Obama administration originally set up the H-4 permit program to help attract high-skilled workers from places like India, and to help their families stay in America with them while waiting to get their green cards.

Repealing the program will split apart families already settled in the U.S. and likely deter highly educated immigrants from coming and doing critical work in the tech industry.

[LFC]

More Trumpian stupidity on immigration. Why the f*** is the State Dept. even bothering with this? Oh, yeah. It's run by Trumpies now.

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A federal judge in California ruled Thursday that a twin son of a gay married couple has been an American citizen since birth, handing a defeat to the U.S. government, which had only granted the status to his brother.

The State Department was wrong to deny citizenship to 2-year-old Ethan Dvash-Banks because U.S. law does not require a child to show a biological relationship with their parents if their parents were married at the time of their birth, District Judge John F. Walter found.

A lawsuit filed by the boys’ parents, Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks, sought the same rights for Ethan that his brother, Aiden, has as a citizen.

Each boy was conceived with donor eggs and the sperm from a different father — one an American, the other an Israeli citizen — but born by the same surrogate mother minutes apart.

The government had only granted citizenship to Aiden, who DNA tests showed was the biological son of Andrew, a U.S. citizen. Ethan was conceived from the sperm of Elad Dvash-Banks, an Israeli citizen.

The suit was one of two filed last year by an LGBTQ immigrant rights group that said the State Department is discriminating against same-sex binational couples by denying their children citizenship at birth. The cases filed in Los Angeles and Washington by Immigration Equality said the children of a U.S. citizen who marries abroad are entitled to U.S. citizenship at birth no matter where they are born, even if the other parent is a foreigner. Only the Los Angeles case was decided Thursday.

[Probabilistic]

LFC, on 22 February 2019 - 01:13 PM, said:

More Trumpian stupidity on immigration. Why the f*** is the State Dept. even bothering with this? Oh, yeah. It's run by Trumpies now.

Damn the 14th!

[pnwguy]

LFC, on 22 February 2019 - 01:13 PM, said:

Why the f*** is the State Dept. even bothering with this? Oh, yeah. It's run by Trumpies now.

Makes perfect sense. When these two gender traitors are executed for their crimes, the US has to only pay to handle a single adoption, not two. Praise be!

[LFC]

More on the sickness of family separation. You know. What the Trump administration kept trying to say they didn't do intentionally and really didn't happen all that much anyway.

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At least 471 parents were deported from the United States without their children, according to new court filings. The Trump administration previously admitted that parents were removed from the country without their children, but the latest report from a family-separation lawsuit provides an updated count. The document states some of the parents were deported “without being given the opportunity to elect or waive reunification” in accordance with a court order in June 2018 that forced the government to better document waivers, CNN reports. But a Department of Homeland Security spokesman says, prior to the order, separated parents were routinely asked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they wished to be reunited with their children before being deported. The filings also provide an update on reunifications: 2,741 of 2,816 children have been discharged from government care, up six from the last count in February.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 07 March 2019 - 11:38 AM, said:

More on the sickness of family separation. You know. What the Trump administration kept trying to say they didn't do intentionally and really didn't happen all that much anyway.

But you see a Wall will stop all this.

[pnwguy]

golden_valley, on 07 March 2019 - 12:22 PM, said:

But you see a Wall will stop all this.

The Magical Trump Wall will also cure cancer, prevent hair loss, and bring about World Peace

[LFC]

pnwguy, on 07 March 2019 - 12:42 PM, said:

The Magical Trump Wall will also cure cancer, prevent hair loss, and bring about World Peace

Well #2 explains the reason Trump wants it so badly.

[pnwguy]

Frum makes a case for rational immigration policy to keep irrational policy out of the hands of demagogues

[LFC]

ICE arrests have hit a record low for picking up people with actual criminal records.

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The percentage of undocumented people with criminal records arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has fallen to a record low, USA Today reported Thursday, meaning that a record percentage of ICE arrestees have committed the civil violation of being in the country without proper documentation but no criminal violation.

According to ICE data flagged by the paper, just 63.5 percent of ICE arrestees in December had criminal records, the lowest figure since ICE started tracking the metric in 2012.

That means a staggering 36.5 percent of ICE arrestees had committed no crimes on record.

Despite President Donald Trump’s campaign-era pledge to arrest and deport “criminal illegal immigrants,” once in office he authorized ICE to abandon the Obama administration’s priority of arresting undocumented people with serious criminal records, replacing it with an executive order to arrest and deport anyone subject to a deportation order.

In July 2017, then-acting ICE Director Thomas Homan said the government’s deportation of non-criminal undocumented people had gone from “zero to 100.”

“No population is off the table,” Homan said, referring to undocumented people eligible to be deported.

Still, while the percentage of non-criminal ICE arrestees has spiked, ICE’s total arrest numbers have declined. Perhaps due to an increase in localities refusing to share jail data with ICE, the agency arrested 12 percent fewer people in the final three months of 2018 than in the same period in 2017, Mother Jones noted.