My heart breaks for the United States of America. It breaks for those who think they are my enemies as much as it does for my friends. You still have your freedom, so use it. There are many groups organizing for both resistance and subsistence, but we are heading into dark times, and you need to be your own light. Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave – and it is often hard to be brave – be kind.
But most of all, never lose sight of who you are and what you value. If you find yourself doing something that feels questionable or wrong a few months or years from now, find that essay you wrote on who you are and read it. Ask if that version of yourself would have done the same thing.
The Trump administration is not only doing everything it can to discourage immigration of all sorts, it intends to launch an effort to identify naturalized American citizens it believes cheated the naturalization process and strip them of their American citizenship. The extraordinary process of denaturalizing an American citizen has occurred very rarely, with the Justice Department filing an estimated 300 civil denaturalization cases since 1990. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna, however, told the Associated Press that the agency is ramping up its efforts to identify citizens who, for instance, assumed new identities in order to avoid deportation and claim a green card or citizenship.
Cissna said his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of suspected fraud. “We finally have a process in place to get to the bottom of all these bad cases and start denaturalizing people who should not have been naturalized in the first place,” Cissna said. “What we’re looking at, when you boil it all down, is potentially a few thousand cases.”
While there is certainly a legitimate government interest in not allowing people into the country under assumed identities—previously this effort targeted literal Nazis and suspected war criminals trying to escape prosecution under assumed identities—the potential for the effort to be used as a means of intimidation and to find small discrepancies or errors in an individual’s naturalization paperwork is problematic. The Trump administration says it does not plan on pursuing deportations based on technicalities, but this is also an administration that is savagely separating families at the border as a form of deterrence to would-be undocumented immigrants.
This is a piece about the new “policy” of separating parents from their children after they are picked up crossing the border. I put in the scare quotes because this is not a policy. It’s atrocity. It is a massive human rights violation being carried out every day in this country and it is ongoing because, I must assume, too many Americans think it matters that the people this is happening to are “illegals.” It does not matter. These are people who have fled their own countries because they are afraid their children will be killed there, and who come to the US to apply for asylum only to have their children taken from them. Then, they are pressured into pleading guilty to entering the country illegally, in hopes that they will then be reunited with their children. It is not clear that that’s what’s actually happening. Here’s a photo of one of the court proceedings at which this happens:
Caption:
A mass immigration trial in April at the Lucius D. Bunton federal courthouse in Pecos, Texas. (Obtained by Debbie Nathan for the Intercept)
This is not due process. This is not how any nation calling itself a democracy or claiming to be living under the rule of law should handle any court proceeding.
As with a lot of these pieces, the focus is on the agony the parents go through over the separation and the uncertainty. This practice would certainly be an atrocity for that reason and that reason alone. I mean do I have to explain that this is, in itself, torture? Even if you don’t have children, can you imagine? Here in the US we are conditioned as parents not to even let our kids walk down the street to buy a sandwich without us and we are, ROUTINELY, taking children away from their their parents at the border, incarcerating the parents, and letting them just wonder when or whether they will ever see their children again.
What nobody is talking about yet, for legitimate reasons in a way since some of this is in the future and some of it is probably already happening but can’t be verified yet, it that this will almost certainly lead to the neglect, abuse, and death of some of these children.
Because history has shown that when you put a large number of children into a facility run by adults who know that they will never be held accountable for what they do, and when on top of that you prevent those children’s parents or families from finding out what’s happening to them, that is what you always get. Neglect, abuse, and when one or both has gone on too long or been pushed too far, death.
This happens in all kinds of institutions, throughout history, all over the world. If it not already happening in the facilities where these children are now being held, well, it will. This policy will kill children. Nobody seems comfortable saying that in the mainstream media, but I do not see how this can go on for long without that consequence.
There is no need to do this. Nobody in Buttercup’s administration is pretending that there is. Sessions has been quite clear about the fact that this is supposed to be a ‘deterrent,’ which means that it is intentionally punitive. There is no stated objective to this so-called ‘policy’ apart from punishing the parents. They don’t seem to want to talk as much about how this is punishing the children–except for Buttercup, who is happy to call them all MS-13 gang members. But it is. And it will get worse.
As
you’re trying to process the daily firehose of Trump on your
various feeds, you have to remember that Trumpisanabuser.
I’m
not talking about how it’s morally important to remember
that fact, although it is. I’m saying the current rush of news makes more sense when you remember some recognizable
patterns in the way abusers think and act:
Abusers
like to hurt people and they do not like to experience consequences
for it. They know how to choose victims who are more vulnerable than
they are.
They
often enable others who share their enjoyment of cruelty.
They
lie, manipulate, and gaslight others. This helps them get away with
misconduct, but it’s also a power trip that they enjoy for its own
sake.
When
they are threatened or injured, they lash out wildly in order to
externalize their feelings of weakness.
Those
patterns provide a useful framework to make sense of what seem to be
the two dominant news stories of the last couple of weeks.
Additionally,
Trump gets some short-term tactical benefits from it.
Spewing the racist venom his base loves intensifies their devotion to
him at a politically dangerous time for him. Saying and doing evil
shit also helps him overload and wear down the rest of us. The press
reports on it because it is actually important that children are
being abused in our names, which leaves less time and attention for
the potentially damaging stuff turning up in the investigations.
He’s
hurting people because he likes it and because, for the moment, he
feels like it’s helping him. He’s doing this because he’s an
abuser. He’s lying frantically because he’s an abuser. These
stories fit into the same framework.
Lastly, understanding these stories together is a small way to deny Trump something he wants. His abuse of vulnerable
people is his attempt to look and feel strong because he feels
defensive and weak about the Russia investigations. He indulges in
lawlessness by proxy with ICE because he feels good cops breathing
down his neck. His desperate tantrums should be understood for what
they are. That means acknowledging the real pain he is causing and remembering that he is lashing out in craven
terror because his bad actions are catching up to him.
WHAT
YOU CAN DO:
If
you have the time, there will be demonstrations over the next couple
of weeks in support of immigrant families. If you have the resources, you can donate.
Doing
what you can to support vulnerable immigrants is worth doing because they’re
human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion.
It is also a concrete, if indirect, way to stand up to the
abuser-in-chief and his illegitimate regime. What these fucking
people want is for us to give up on each other and let them decide
who is human and what is American. Fuck them.
It’s
almost hard to get perspective on how important this is, because it’s
genuinely unprecedented. But it’s a big fucking deal and you need
to know where things are.
The
DOJ made a lot of extra work for itself with this decision, because
now they have to set up a second team to go through all the documents
and separate privileged communication and evidence of a crime.
Cohen’s lawyers will challenge it in court. Whatever
they have is worth the
headache.
To
get the warrant,
the feds had to convince a judge that it was more likely than not
that Cohen’s home and office had specific
evidence of a criminal
conspiracy between Cohen and his client.
Getting
Cohen’s documents in
surprise raids,
rather than by
subpoena, means they could show that he would probably obstruct
justice otherwise.
For
reasons we don’t know yet, the search wasn’t actually carried out
by special prosecutor Mueller’s team. Mueller’s office found
evidence against Cohen and took it to their boss Deputy Attorney
General Rosenstein, who decided
that the case should go through the federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
That suggests most of what
they found isn’t strictly about Russian election interference, but
is still serious enough to pursue. Critically, this
takes things even further out of Trump’s hands.
Even if he tries to go
nuclear on the special prosecutor’s office, he can’t
make the Southern District of New York go away.
We
don’t know what’s next. But things can happen very quickly. Pay
attention.
What
you can do:
Even
though it won’t save him anymore, Trump may still lash out and try
to get rid of the special prosecutor. We can’t let that happen.
Mueller’s office is pretty much the only one trying to get to the
bottom of Russian interference in the 2016 election. More broadly,
though, Trump firing someone appointed specifically to investigate
him would basically be him saying he’s above the law. MoveOn has
rapid response protests planned all over the country to protect
Mueller’s job.
Call
your representatives in Congress and tell them to vote for
legislation protecting the special prosecutor’s office. You don’t
need to know the nuances of a specific bill or anything. Call their
office and say “My name is [x] and I am your constituent. I expect
you to pass legislation protecting Special Prosecutor Robert
Mueller.” Then repeat for your senators.
Reading
and posting online doesn’t usually count as Doing A Thing. Right
now, though, it does. Understanding where we are and helping to make
other people aware are really important steps that we all need to
take.
The KOMO segments feature several different pairs of anchors sticking word-for-word to a Sinclair script they were required to read.
“They’re certainly not happy about it,” a KOMO newsroom employee told SeattlePI. “It’s certainly a forced thing.”
(A) But we’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country. The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media.
(B) More alarming, some media outlets publish these same fake stories… stories that just aren’t true, without checking facts first.
(A) Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think’.
The claim of balanced reporting is undermined by must-run segments like the one about the “Deep State” that ran during KOMO’s 6 p.m. newscast last week… That segment was produced by Sinclair’s Kristine Frazao, who before coming to Sinclair was a reporter and anchor for the Russian-government funded news network RT, described as “the Kremlin’s propaganda outlet” by the Columbia Journalism Review.
Sinclair also requires stations to run segments from Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-born former Trump adviserwho now serves as Sinclair’s chief political analyst. Epshteyn recently produced stories with titles like, “Pres. Trump deserves cabinet and staff who support his agenda, yield successes” and “Cable news channels are giving way too much coverage to Stormy Daniels.”…
Maryland-based Sinclair owns 193 stations across more than 100 U.S. markets. That number would rise to 233 if the Federal Communications Commission approves its acquisition of Tribune Media. The FCC has emphasized Sinclair-friendly deregulation during the Trump presidency, with Chairman Ajit Pai helping to ease the rules on owning multiple TV and radio stations in the same market.
Hearseeno 