@WarChiefZeke And once again, the actual facts show that you are wrong.
Credit to @Grond0 above, of course.
"
Your reference to Obama splitting families up was one of the two main talking points Trump used to defend the introduction of the zero tolerance policy (the other was that the law required him to split them up). Both those claims have been debunked many times - see here for example."
What's next? If Trump is innocent, as you keep claiming, how about you try defending his use of these camps?
Lastly - they were targeted to be intentionally split apart from their families as a means to terrorize them into not coming.
Agents at the border have seen cases where the same child shows up with three or four different "families" and the adults always claim "yes, this is our child". Children are being used by some of these people to maximize their likelihood of being granted entry into the United States; the children who remain in Mexico or are returned there often wind up being trafficked by the cartels in other ways. Conclusion: it is in the best interest of the child to separate them from the adults they show up with and place them with families or homes in the United States as opposed to leaving them to the whims of the cartels. That is definitely better than the other alternative which is already being pilot-tested: collecting DNA from people seeking asylum to prove that the children are actually theirs. Collecting DNA samples from innocent people is worse than separating children from potential parents because you know they will hang on to those DNA results forever.
Of course, if Congress *wanted* to update or modernize the immigration laws they would *do* it. But, no, the House thought that impeachment was a better use of its time--they were wrong.
I see that Bloomberg managed to buy his way onto the debate stage. Not surprised.
I support bail reform, but that one guy in New York City who has been arrested 136 times....*whew* There is always that one person who finds a way to abuse the system. He has been arrested once per week so far this year for his continued sting of robberies in the subways but as long as he doesn't rob people violently then he continues to be allowed to go free without having to post bail.
Lastly - they were targeted to be intentionally split apart from their families as a means to terrorize them into not coming.
Agents at the border have seen cases where the same child shows up with three or four different "families" and the adults always claim "yes, this is our child". Children are being used by some of these people to maximize their likelihood of being granted entry into the United States; the children who remain in Mexico or are returned there often wind up being trafficked by the cartels in other ways. Conclusion: it is in the best interest of the child to separate them from the adults they show up with and place them with families or homes in the United States as opposed to leaving them to the whims of the cartels. That is definitely better than the other alternative which is already being pilot-tested: collecting DNA from people seeking asylum to prove that the children are actually theirs. Collecting DNA samples from innocent people is worse than separating children from potential parents because you know they will hang on to those DNA results forever.
Of course, if Congress *wanted* to update or modernize the immigration laws they would *do* it. But, no, the House thought that impeachment was a better use of its time--they were wrong.
I see that Bloomberg managed to buy his way onto the debate stage. Not surprised.
I support bail reform, but that one guy in New York City who has been arrested 136 times....*whew* There is always that one person who finds a way to abuse the system. He has been arrested once per week so far this year for his continued sting of robberies in the subways but as long as he doesn't rob people violently then he continues to be allowed to go free without having to post bail.
So all adults bringing kids across the border are guilty of this?
Give me a break.
If there is documented cases of kids being exploited like this and it can be proven then yes, remove those children from their “family” and place them in adopted care with full citizenship once they turn 18 (if not before).
If this claim can’t be proven then sorry, that kid stays with his/her family. You can’t accuse everyone of being guilty.
I never said "all adults do this" but there are definitely documented cases of the same children being shuffled around from "family" to "family"; *those* adults are engaged in trafficking. I also don't accuse everyone of being guilty--the only guilty people are the ones who are breaking laws or attempting to break laws.
On the other hand, one may not automatically assume that a family unit presenting itself at the border seeking asylum is actually a family unit. There are plenty of people willing to lie to gain some benefit for themselves.
I never said "all adults do this" but there are definitely documented cases of the same children being shuffled around from "family" to "family"; *those* adults are engaged in trafficking. I also don't accuse everyone of being guilty--the only guilty people are the ones who are breaking laws or attempting to break laws.
On the other hand, one may not automatically assume that a family unit presenting itself at the border seeking asylum is actually a family unit. There are plenty of people willing to lie to gain some benefit for themselves.
You did though say that separating families (just in case they are not real families) is a better solution than testing to confirm whether they actually are families. That seems a pretty extraordinary position to me and one I suspect would be shared by a vanishingly small number of genuine families seeking asylum.
nothing you're saying forms any kind of counter or reponse to: "they were targeted to be intentionally split apart from their families as a means to terrorize them into not coming."
since you apparently don't refute that this terror tactic is being used, when you use the phrase "child's best interest" you are saying that the said tactic is in the children's best interest which is obviously incoherent.
If Trump thinks Democrats are clamoring for this and are going to rush to praise him, he is SADLY mistaken. This guy tried to, quite literally, SELL Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat. He should serve every day of his sentence for his breach of the public trust. And the real reason Trump is doing this?? To further prove that even the thin veneer of the rule of law in this country is meaningless. "Law and Order" is for black kids who have the unmitigated gall to walk down the street in a white neighborhood, or for migrants crossing a line on a map. Not anyone with money or connections:
Edit: he is also going to pardon the former owner of the 49ers, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., for his conviction in an extortion scheme. See a pattern here?? Reality-show nonsense masquerading a serious country on the world stage. How utterly ridiculous. It's amazing all the people who cheered Trump as a man of the people at the Daytona 500 this weekend, when he literally drove a LIMO in the track (I know "down-home", I grew up in it, and a limo on a race track ain't it, sister). He doesn't give a fuck about any of you. THESE are the people he cares about. NFL owners and corrupt governors.
Edit: AND for good measure, Rudy's Chief of Police who used 9/11 funds to set up a love nest for his mistress near Ground Zero:
Add convicted financier Mike Milken to the list. It's evidently get out of jail free day for white collar criminals. In the last hour that is one corrupt governor, one football team owner, one dirty cop, and one Wall Steet fraudster. Might as well go for serial killer to get a bingo. Is Dennis Rader still alive??
You did though say that separating families (just in case they are not real families) is a better solution than testing to confirm whether they actually are families. That seems a pretty extraordinary position to me and one I suspect would be shared by a vanishingly small number of genuine families seeking asylum.
If you meet me in real life and I present the woman with whom I am having dinner as "my wife", how do you know I am telling the truth? What if she is really my mistress and I am just trying to avoid any unpleasant scenes or awkward conversation silences?
If a family shows up to seek asylum and they have a five-year-old with them but no documentation, how do you know that they are the parents? Sure, you could ask the kid "are these your parents?" but the child will have trained to say "yes, they are my parents". If, on the other hand, you have taken photos of the people seeking asylum and you run across that child's photo from a previous case then someone is doing something they ought not be doing...and it isn't the child doing anything wrong. In that instance, you take the child, place them, and tell the adults to wait in Mexico. How difficult a concept is that? It actually isn't going to happen a lot, but it is better to err on the side of caution and make sure the kids get into an environment that is safer than being subject to the cartels.
I do not agree with DNA testing of everyone coming to the border--that sort of intrusion is worse than separation because you know that authorities are going to keep that DNA on file as well as running it against unsolved cases just in case they get a hit. This is same logic police use when they randomly run your license plate just to see if there are any open warrants against the registered owner of the vehicle.
*************
I have to concur--I see absolutely no logic whatsoever in commuting Blagojevich's sentence. I have never even heard of this other gay, DeBartolo. Let me look....okay, he failed to report a bribe back in 1998. What? Gambling fraud so he could get a riverboat license? erm...okay. What purpose does that serve? *shrug*
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) admitted meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. A little awkward, I have to admit, but the guy is a Senator and the Senate is the body responsible for foreign policy alongside the State Department. He is perfectly within his rights as a Senator to have held that meeting--nothing to see there.
edit/add: wait, he pardoned/commuted Milken as well? The younger folks here won't remember the glory days of Wall Street when junk bonds were everywhere and insider trading was "business as usual". In a bizarre twist of fate, though, Milken made more money *after* getting out of Federal prison than he did before he went in.
That is why I wrote you off and dismissed you the last time our paths crossed. I see nothing has changed, which doesn't surprise me in the least. Expect no more replies to your comments.
Nearly all the children who arrived at the US border actually on their own were teenagers. It's true that UAC is a slightly misleading category as it includes any child who does not accompany a biological parent or legal guardian. This means that there were always a small number of young children arriving, e.g. with their grandparents or older siblings. However, the proportion of young children was far higher for those arriving in designated families than for UAC generally.
Between 2013-2014 the number of extremely young uac's tripled and at one point they were housing hundreds of toddlers alone at once. They were arriving into a system which they could be abused without consequence and with documented cases of the use of coercion and record falsification to encourage deportation. We don't the extent of the harm done, and likely won't ever. While the very young weren't the majority, and still are not, there was a substantial amount of them.
Your reference to Obama splitting families up was one of the two main talking points Trump used to defend the introduction of the zero tolerance policy (the other was that the law required him to split them up). Both those claims have been debunked many times - see here for example. There may be good reasons for splitting families up (to protect children for instance), but Trump's policy was not intended to do that - instead it aimed at causing deliberate harm to children and/or family relationships in order to discourage other parents from bringing children to the US. As I've said before I think that intention goes well beyond something that could be defended as a misguided attempt to address real issues of concern.
This clearly doesn't debunk what I said. Family separation remains a fact under the Obama policy, just for more than immigration crimes, as I stated. Having a prior criminal conviction or lack of documents for your kid will get your family separated. This is debunking the specific notion that they are exactly the same, which isn't what I said. In fact we agree on the difference, which is scale.
The problem about speaking to intent is that it is opinion and not fact. I actually agree with you that his motives were probably not good but I could say the same of Obama who you ascribe good intentions to. Which is something of a pattern, I tend to agree with your criticisms of republicans just not your defenses of the left.
Was there a good reason to fail to investigate the destruction of documents, the use of coercion on kids to encourage deportation, rampant physical and sexual abuse, and inhumane conditions during his time? I mean, if we're going to be using our opinions about intent as relevant facts here, I think this doesn't bode well for that argument. He clearly allowed harm on a systemic scale to continue without consequence. Did he do it as a punitive measure? Or did he do it to save his own reputation and avoid the bad publicity?
I don't deny the policy is punitive and immoral. I just see little in the way of difference between the two in practice, and I certainly wouldn't consider calling either one well intentioned. I think both of them were indifferent. Trump's intent wasn't to be malicious towards kids but to punish illegal entry in all cases, that was the intentional deterrent, and he didn't care about them so he was willing to trade off their risk for his benefit.
Obama was willing to violations of federal and international law on humane treatment to continue to be violated on his watch most likely to avoid bad publicity, not malicious, but self interested.
Trump filled these centers to capacity, holding way more people than Obama ever did. And they were ALL CHILDREN. Even as young as TODDLERS were held. They did not recieve enough food, oftentimes frozen or raw. No medical care, and didn't even get BEDS. Children also DIED while in US "care". Some of the girls were even sexually assaulted. When the courts ordered the kids back, nothing happened for weeks. It came out that there was NO DOCUMENTATION. To this day, we still don't know how many kids were taken or even how many have been returned.
There is no equality here
Sorry to go back to this, but everything you are saying here that makes these two situations unequal happened under Obama.
Filled far beyond capacity? Check.
Children without beds or adequate food and more? Check.
Sexual assault? Check.
Abuse by guards? Check. It happened systemically under Obama actually, and was swept under the rug and not investigated, and yes, they were aware.
It never ceases to amaze me how people in this thread continually need to retread old arguments months and months after they have been discussed. The same people.
We've gone over the statistics. No one is claiming Obama is a saint (Strawman, by the way - literally everyone who has referenced him on this page have derided his actions on thgis issue). The conditions at the border under Trump are categorically worse than the conditions under Obama at the border. They were held longer. They were more crowded. They were more consistently denied basic amenities.
Lastly - they were targeted to be intentionally split apart from their families as a means to terrorize them into not coming.
Nope, nope, and nope. The conditions were just as bad if not worse. The crowding conditions are relatively the same with the highest numbers being in 2014 and 2019. They were consistently denied basic amenities and far, far worse during the Obama years.
We wouldn't have to retread these things if you weren't, you know, wrong. It's a perfect symbol of the reflexive need to defend anyone on the left even if it means denying basic realities.
And if you don't like it, don't comment. I'm certainly not obligated to go the standard route and rage about Trump all the time.
This is what the Obama years looked like at the border. He also had more children coming in, as a percentage and total, than the years of Trump.
On the one hand, as noted I don't see any logic behind some of Trump's most recent pardons. On the other hand, CNN is suggesting that prosecutors and Congress should "do something" about Trump's ability to issue pardons. There is only one problem with that: there is nothing Congress can do to restrict Trump's ability to issue pardons. Federal prosecutors can't do anything about Presidential pardons, either....
...but State Attorneys General *can* do something about them. Presidential pardons can not and do not apply to State prosecutions. Of course, the statute of limitations for the crime in question must not have expired and the crime must have occurred in the State in question--DeBartolo committed crimes in Louisiana so he could not be charged in New York...unless, of course, there is some sort of wire fraud in question and the other end of the fraud happened in New York.
"Human smugglers have contributed to the rise in families and children by offering discounted fees to adults who travel with children. Smugglers can drop them at the border and instruct them to claim asylum rather than guiding them across and trying to evade Border Patrol."
People who advocate for unlimited immigration never seem to get around to addressing the human trafficking which goes on at the border. They also often seem to think that every asylum seeker is telling the truth, which is naive. Anyway...the Tribune has reporters in cities along the border so they are on the front line of immigration when they report. I don't always like the Tribune but there are some issues where they are better than any other news source.
As long as the promise of gaining entry into a country by crossing illegally without deportation remains, people will risk the journey. As long as people are willing to risk the journey, human traffickers will try to exploit the system by any available route. They create the market and the incentive structure for sexual abuse and trafficking.
The cartels still make a lot of money from drugs, but in recent years they have ramped up the human trafficking because it is also lucrative. Their latest venture: avocado farms. No, I am not kidding--there have been turf wars to control avocado fields in the last year; the migrants who can't make it into the United States will often find themselves working on a cartel avocado farm, which I have to admit is better than being turned into a pistolero or prostitute.
Nearly all the children who arrived at the US border actually on their own were teenagers. It's true that UAC is a slightly misleading category as it includes any child who does not accompany a biological parent or legal guardian. This means that there were always a small number of young children arriving, e.g. with their grandparents or older siblings. However, the proportion of young children was far higher for those arriving in designated families than for UAC generally.
Between 2013-2014 the number of extremely young uac's tripled and at one point they were housing hundreds of toddlers alone at once. They were arriving into a system which they could be abused without consequence and with documented cases of the use of coercion and record falsification to encourage deportation. We don't the extent of the harm done, and likely won't ever. While the very young weren't the majority, and still are not, there was a substantial amount of them.
Your reference to Obama splitting families up was one of the two main talking points Trump used to defend the introduction of the zero tolerance policy (the other was that the law required him to split them up). Both those claims have been debunked many times - see here for example. There may be good reasons for splitting families up (to protect children for instance), but Trump's policy was not intended to do that - instead it aimed at causing deliberate harm to children and/or family relationships in order to discourage other parents from bringing children to the US. As I've said before I think that intention goes well beyond something that could be defended as a misguided attempt to address real issues of concern.
This clearly doesn't debunk what I said. Family separation remains a fact under the Obama policy, just for more than immigration crimes, as I stated. Having a prior criminal conviction or lack of documents for your kid will get your family separated. This is debunking the specific notion that they are exactly the same, which isn't what I said. In fact we agree on the difference, which is scale.
The problem about speaking to intent is that it is opinion and not fact. I actually agree with you that his motives were probably not good but I could say the same of Obama who you ascribe good intentions to. Which is something of a pattern, I tend to agree with your criticisms of republicans just not your defenses of the left.
Was there a good reason to fail to investigate the destruction of documents, the use of coercion on kids to encourage deportation, rampant physical and sexual abuse, and inhumane conditions during his time? I mean, if we're going to be using our opinions about intent as relevant facts here, I think this doesn't bode well for that argument. He clearly allowed harm on a systemic scale to continue without consequence. Did he do it as a punitive measure? Or did he do it to save his own reputation and avoid the bad publicity?
I don't deny the policy is punitive and immoral. I just see little in the way of difference between the two in practice, and I certainly wouldn't consider calling either one well intentioned. I think both of them were indifferent. Trump's intent wasn't to be malicious towards kids but to punish illegal entry in all cases, that was the intentional deterrent, and he didn't care about them so he was willing to trade off their risk for his benefit.
Obama was willing to violations of federal and international law on humane treatment to continue to be violated on his watch most likely to avoid bad publicity, not malicious, but self interested.
I can agree with most of this. I've no particular interest in defending Obama and agree that there were plenty of things that went wrong on his watch.
You said previously though "Just don't pretend the bulk of this wasn't already done before and the only difference is more people were getting caught up in it." I'm not pretending in the least when I say that the difference is not just that far more families were split up by Trump's policy, but that the policy itself is qualitatively different.
Splitting up families because you think that's in the best interests of the children is something most modern governments do (not just to immigrants - children may be removed from abusive parents by social services for example). Splitting up families with, at best, no regard for the interests of the children and, at worst, a deliberate intention to harm the children (in order to teach others a lesson) is not something most modern governments do. There have been episodes of that sort of behavior in the past where governments have engaged in highly dubious social engineering experiments, e.g. the Irish children of single mothers sent to Australia or the indigenous Canadian children forcibly separated from their parents - but the past is where those sorts of policies should have remained.
Nearly all the children who arrived at the US border actually on their own were teenagers. It's true that UAC is a slightly misleading category as it includes any child who does not accompany a biological parent or legal guardian. This means that there were always a small number of young children arriving, e.g. with their grandparents or older siblings. However, the proportion of young children was far higher for those arriving in designated families than for UAC generally.
Between 2013-2014 the number of extremely young uac's tripled and at one point they were housing hundreds of toddlers alone at once. They were arriving into a system which they could be abused without consequence and with documented cases of the use of coercion and record falsification to encourage deportation. We don't the extent of the harm done, and likely won't ever. While the very young weren't the majority, and still are not, there was a substantial amount of them.
Your reference to Obama splitting families up was one of the two main talking points Trump used to defend the introduction of the zero tolerance policy (the other was that the law required him to split them up). Both those claims have been debunked many times - see here for example. There may be good reasons for splitting families up (to protect children for instance), but Trump's policy was not intended to do that - instead it aimed at causing deliberate harm to children and/or family relationships in order to discourage other parents from bringing children to the US. As I've said before I think that intention goes well beyond something that could be defended as a misguided attempt to address real issues of concern.
This clearly doesn't debunk what I said. Family separation remains a fact under the Obama policy, just for more than immigration crimes, as I stated. Having a prior criminal conviction or lack of documents for your kid will get your family separated. This is debunking the specific notion that they are exactly the same, which isn't what I said. In fact we agree on the difference, which is scale.
The problem about speaking to intent is that it is opinion and not fact. I actually agree with you that his motives were probably not good but I could say the same of Obama who you ascribe good intentions to. Which is something of a pattern, I tend to agree with your criticisms of republicans just not your defenses of the left.
Was there a good reason to fail to investigate the destruction of documents, the use of coercion on kids to encourage deportation, rampant physical and sexual abuse, and inhumane conditions during his time? I mean, if we're going to be using our opinions about intent as relevant facts here, I think this doesn't bode well for that argument. He clearly allowed harm on a systemic scale to continue without consequence. Did he do it as a punitive measure? Or did he do it to save his own reputation and avoid the bad publicity?
I don't deny the policy is punitive and immoral. I just see little in the way of difference between the two in practice, and I certainly wouldn't consider calling either one well intentioned. I think both of them were indifferent. Trump's intent wasn't to be malicious towards kids but to punish illegal entry in all cases, that was the intentional deterrent, and he didn't care about them so he was willing to trade off their risk for his benefit.
Obama was willing to violations of federal and international law on humane treatment to continue to be violated on his watch most likely to avoid bad publicity, not malicious, but self interested.
I can agree with most of this. I've no particular interest in defending Obama and agree that there were plenty of things that went wrong on his watch.
You said previously though "Just don't pretend the bulk of this wasn't already done before and the only difference is more people were getting caught up in it." I'm not pretending in the least when I say that the difference is not just that far more families were split up by Trump's policy, but that the policy itself is qualitatively different.
Splitting up families because you think that's in the best interests of the children is something most modern governments do (not just to immigrants - children may be removed from abusive parents by social services for example). Splitting up families with, at best, no regard for the interests of the children and, at worst, a deliberate intention to harm the children (in order to teach others a lesson) is not something most modern governments do. There have been episodes of that sort of behavior in the past where governments have engaged in highly dubious social engineering experiments, e.g. the Irish children of single mothers sent to Australia or the indigenous Canadian children forcibly separated from their parents - but the past is where those sorts of policies should have remained.
I agree with this, but I should have made it more clear. The nature of it as a deterrent was unique and was unacceptable. I just don't think that distinction is a massive moral difference from the myriad of other ways the entire border situation is deeply flawed.
I am not in a position to set policy, so my opinion is worth only the pixels which comprise the letters on the screen. That being said, if I were a migrant child I would much rather be in the United States without my biological parents as opposed to trying to be one big happy family in a tent in Ciudad Juarez.
disclosure: my father was a womanizer and my mother was a doormat who never stood up to him. I don't have a great view of parents in general, despite accidentally becoming one via marriage. At best, my standard operating procedure was "don't do what they did", which actually isn't the best plan.
I'm not sure I would want the same. I think I would want to stay with my family if at all possible. Turn them away at the border, and try to fund aid programs on the other side, until their cases are approved or denied. Many such organizations already exist, but still.
Truthfully, I don't value "family" as much as many other people do. Accidental relation via genetics is pretty meaningless and "family" is usually the number one cause of most emotional problems people have.
Trump overturned justice to 11, including Michael Milken (the Junk Bond King) and Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat, worked with Trump on “The Celebrity Apprentice” in 2010.
Banana Republicans are destroying the rule of law in America.
Disgusting.
It's difficult enough to get rich people to face justice and Trump has shown that even if you do get convicted he'll toss out the sentence.
If Epstein hadn't died in Barr's custody Trump would surely have pardoned his old friend.
No wonder more than 2000 former Justice Department employees are demanding Barr resign and Trump quit undermining American justice.
Trump filled these centers to capacity, holding way more people than Obama ever did. And they were ALL CHILDREN. Even as young as TODDLERS were held. They did not recieve enough food, oftentimes frozen or raw. No medical care, and didn't even get BEDS. Children also DIED while in US "care". Some of the girls were even sexually assaulted. When the courts ordered the kids back, nothing happened for weeks. It came out that there was NO DOCUMENTATION. To this day, we still don't know how many kids were taken or even how many have been returned.
There is no equality here
Sorry to go back to this, but everything you are saying here that makes these two situations unequal happened under Obama.
Filled far beyond capacity? Check.
Children without beds or adequate food and more? Check.
Sexual assault? Check.
Abuse by guards? Check. It happened systemically under Obama actually, and was swept under the rug and not investigated, and yes, they were aware.
It never ceases to amaze me how people in this thread continually need to retread old arguments months and months after they have been discussed. The same people.
We've gone over the statistics. No one is claiming Obama is a saint (Strawman, by the way - literally everyone who has referenced him on this page have derided his actions on thgis issue). The conditions at the border under Trump are categorically worse than the conditions under Obama at the border. They were held longer. They were more crowded. They were more consistently denied basic amenities.
Lastly - they were targeted to be intentionally split apart from their families as a means to terrorize them into not coming.
Nope, nope, and nope. The conditions were just as bad if not worse. The crowding conditions are relatively the same with the highest numbers being in 2014 and 2019. They were consistently denied basic amenities and far, far worse during the Obama years.
We wouldn't have to retread these things if you weren't, you know, wrong. It's a perfect symbol of the reflexive need to defend anyone on the left even if it means denying basic realities.
And if you don't like it, don't comment. I'm certainly not obligated to go the standard route and rage about Trump all the time.
This is what the Obama years looked like at the border. He also had more children coming in, as a percentage and total, than the years of Trump.
I'm not providing additional evidence because I've refuted the claims in the past. You can directly compare the number of people held at the border facilities. You can compare the amount of time, and you can see that Trump's administration attempted to prevent them from having basic needs met. In all 3 situations, the conditions are objectively worse under this administration.
I'm not obligated to respond. I'm also not obligated to point out when you're wrong. Doesnt mean I wont.
I'm sure in 6 months we'll all get to revisit the topic when someone get reflexively upset that Trump is being castigated for doing something that Breitbart says Obama actually did.
As long as the promise of gaining entry into a country by crossing illegally without deportation remains, people will risk the journey. As long as people are willing to risk the journey, human traffickers will try to exploit the system by any available route. They create the market and the incentive structure for sexual abuse and trafficking.
If crossing the border wasn't a crime, you wouldn't have to try to trust criminals to cross it.
I like how you are making a strong argument for open borders.
It's not my cup of tea but I'd say we can do better than driving people to resort to criminal means of crossing the border. This is supposed to be America, the land of immigrants, give us your poor tired, yada yada yada.
Trump filled these centers to capacity, holding way more people than Obama ever did. And they were ALL CHILDREN. Even as young as TODDLERS were held. They did not recieve enough food, oftentimes frozen or raw. No medical care, and didn't even get BEDS. Children also DIED while in US "care". Some of the girls were even sexually assaulted. When the courts ordered the kids back, nothing happened for weeks. It came out that there was NO DOCUMENTATION. To this day, we still don't know how many kids were taken or even how many have been returned.
There is no equality here
Sorry to go back to this, but everything you are saying here that makes these two situations unequal happened under Obama.
Filled far beyond capacity? Check.
Children without beds or adequate food and more? Check.
Sexual assault? Check.
Abuse by guards? Check. It happened systemically under Obama actually, and was swept under the rug and not investigated, and yes, they were aware.
It never ceases to amaze me how people in this thread continually need to retread old arguments months and months after they have been discussed. The same people.
We've gone over the statistics. No one is claiming Obama is a saint (Strawman, by the way - literally everyone who has referenced him on this page have derided his actions on thgis issue). The conditions at the border under Trump are categorically worse than the conditions under Obama at the border. They were held longer. They were more crowded. They were more consistently denied basic amenities.
Lastly - they were targeted to be intentionally split apart from their families as a means to terrorize them into not coming.
Nope, nope, and nope. The conditions were just as bad if not worse. The crowding conditions are relatively the same with the highest numbers being in 2014 and 2019. They were consistently denied basic amenities and far, far worse during the Obama years.
We wouldn't have to retread these things if you weren't, you know, wrong. It's a perfect symbol of the reflexive need to defend anyone on the left even if it means denying basic realities.
And if you don't like it, don't comment. I'm certainly not obligated to go the standard route and rage about Trump all the time.
This is what the Obama years looked like at the border. He also had more children coming in, as a percentage and total, than the years of Trump.
I'm not providing additional evidence because I've refuted the claims in the past. You can directly compare the number of people held at the border facilities. You can compare the amount of time, and you can see that Trump's administration attempted to prevent them from having basic needs met. In all 3 situations, the conditions are objectively worse under this administration.
I'm not obligated to respond. I'm also not obligated to point out when you're wrong. Doesnt mean I wont.
I'm sure in 6 months we'll all get to revisit the topic when someone get reflexively upset that Trump is being castigated for doing something that Breitbart says Obama actually did.
This argument has really fallen to a new low if longer wait times is the lynchpin for the case that it was categorically worse.
I have a better metric to use: abuse. There were four times as many proven cases of sexual abuse under Obama's reign than under Trumps. This comes straight from the HHS statistics on unaccompanied minors.
On the one hand, as noted I don't see any logic behind some of Trump's most recent pardons. On the other hand, CNN is suggesting that prosecutors and Congress should "do something" about Trump's ability to issue pardons. There is only one problem with that: there is nothing Congress can do to restrict Trump's ability to issue pardons. Federal prosecutors can't do anything about Presidential pardons, either....
...but State Attorneys General *can* do something about them. Presidential pardons can not and do not apply to State prosecutions. Of course, the statute of limitations for the crime in question must not have expired and the crime must have occurred in the State in question--DeBartolo committed crimes in Louisiana so he could not be charged in New York...unless, of course, there is some sort of wire fraud in question and the other end of the fraud happened in New York.
His logic is “I can do this and nothing is going to stop me.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if he is selling pardons for campaign donations, although I personally can’t prove that.
On the one hand, as noted I don't see any logic behind some of Trump's most recent pardons. On the other hand, CNN is suggesting that prosecutors and Congress should "do something" about Trump's ability to issue pardons. There is only one problem with that: there is nothing Congress can do to restrict Trump's ability to issue pardons. Federal prosecutors can't do anything about Presidential pardons, either....
...but State Attorneys General *can* do something about them. Presidential pardons can not and do not apply to State prosecutions. Of course, the statute of limitations for the crime in question must not have expired and the crime must have occurred in the State in question--DeBartolo committed crimes in Louisiana so he could not be charged in New York...unless, of course, there is some sort of wire fraud in question and the other end of the fraud happened in New York.
His logic is “I can do this and nothing is going to stop me.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if he is selling pardons for campaign donations, although I personally can’t prove that.
If he is doing that then that's bribery, another impeachable offense explicitly defined in the Constitution. Of course Republicans stand for nothing and are highly conflicted partisan hacks and so they won't do anything about it. Maybe they'll slightly be concerned and then go nothing.
Trump has pardoned Arpaio, D’Souza, DeBartolo and Kerik, commuted Blagojevich’s sentence, and will probably do the same for Roger Stone. So apparently when he said he was going to drain the swamp he meant drain it into our drinking water.
I do not agree with DNA testing of everyone coming to the border--that sort of intrusion is worse than separation because you know that authorities are going to keep that DNA on file as well as running it against unsolved cases just in case they get a hit. This is same logic police use when they randomly run your license plate just to see if there are any open warrants against the registered owner of the vehicle.
(emphasis mine)
First off, this is a false choice. You could limit it to families or even offer families voluntary testing to not get separated - though in the case of adopted children that is not fool-proof.
Beyond that and more importantly, I am frankly appalled how far values seem to differ here. I do not know a single parent who given the choice between his country (or another one entirely) obtaining his DNA or being separated from their children for months (maybe forever) would not choose keeping the kids. If you are taking their children away is worse than taking their DNA our value systems are fundamentally incompatible.
Nothing says 'drain the swamp' quite like pardoning a slew of politicians and public officials convicted of corruption.
The son of one of Trump’s pardon recipients gave $85k to Trump victory this August. His wife gave $50k that same month. On top of that, they made an in-kind contribution for $75k in air travel.
Comments
Credit to @Grond0 above, of course.
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Your reference to Obama splitting families up was one of the two main talking points Trump used to defend the introduction of the zero tolerance policy (the other was that the law required him to split them up). Both those claims have been debunked many times - see here for example."
What's next? If Trump is innocent, as you keep claiming, how about you try defending his use of these camps?
Agents at the border have seen cases where the same child shows up with three or four different "families" and the adults always claim "yes, this is our child". Children are being used by some of these people to maximize their likelihood of being granted entry into the United States; the children who remain in Mexico or are returned there often wind up being trafficked by the cartels in other ways. Conclusion: it is in the best interest of the child to separate them from the adults they show up with and place them with families or homes in the United States as opposed to leaving them to the whims of the cartels. That is definitely better than the other alternative which is already being pilot-tested: collecting DNA from people seeking asylum to prove that the children are actually theirs. Collecting DNA samples from innocent people is worse than separating children from potential parents because you know they will hang on to those DNA results forever.
Of course, if Congress *wanted* to update or modernize the immigration laws they would *do* it. But, no, the House thought that impeachment was a better use of its time--they were wrong.
I see that Bloomberg managed to buy his way onto the debate stage. Not surprised.
I support bail reform, but that one guy in New York City who has been arrested 136 times....*whew* There is always that one person who finds a way to abuse the system. He has been arrested once per week so far this year for his continued sting of robberies in the subways but as long as he doesn't rob people violently then he continues to be allowed to go free without having to post bail.
So all adults bringing kids across the border are guilty of this?
Give me a break.
If there is documented cases of kids being exploited like this and it can be proven then yes, remove those children from their “family” and place them in adopted care with full citizenship once they turn 18 (if not before).
If this claim can’t be proven then sorry, that kid stays with his/her family. You can’t accuse everyone of being guilty.
On the other hand, one may not automatically assume that a family unit presenting itself at the border seeking asylum is actually a family unit. There are plenty of people willing to lie to gain some benefit for themselves.
You did though say that separating families (just in case they are not real families) is a better solution than testing to confirm whether they actually are families. That seems a pretty extraordinary position to me and one I suspect would be shared by a vanishingly small number of genuine families seeking asylum.
since you apparently don't refute that this terror tactic is being used, when you use the phrase "child's best interest" you are saying that the said tactic is in the children's best interest which is obviously incoherent.
Edit: he is also going to pardon the former owner of the 49ers, Eddie DeBartolo Jr., for his conviction in an extortion scheme. See a pattern here?? Reality-show nonsense masquerading a serious country on the world stage. How utterly ridiculous. It's amazing all the people who cheered Trump as a man of the people at the Daytona 500 this weekend, when he literally drove a LIMO in the track (I know "down-home", I grew up in it, and a limo on a race track ain't it, sister). He doesn't give a fuck about any of you. THESE are the people he cares about. NFL owners and corrupt governors.
Edit: AND for good measure, Rudy's Chief of Police who used 9/11 funds to set up a love nest for his mistress near Ground Zero:
Add convicted financier Mike Milken to the list. It's evidently get out of jail free day for white collar criminals. In the last hour that is one corrupt governor, one football team owner, one dirty cop, and one Wall Steet fraudster. Might as well go for serial killer to get a bingo. Is Dennis Rader still alive??
If you meet me in real life and I present the woman with whom I am having dinner as "my wife", how do you know I am telling the truth? What if she is really my mistress and I am just trying to avoid any unpleasant scenes or awkward conversation silences?
If a family shows up to seek asylum and they have a five-year-old with them but no documentation, how do you know that they are the parents? Sure, you could ask the kid "are these your parents?" but the child will have trained to say "yes, they are my parents". If, on the other hand, you have taken photos of the people seeking asylum and you run across that child's photo from a previous case then someone is doing something they ought not be doing...and it isn't the child doing anything wrong. In that instance, you take the child, place them, and tell the adults to wait in Mexico. How difficult a concept is that? It actually isn't going to happen a lot, but it is better to err on the side of caution and make sure the kids get into an environment that is safer than being subject to the cartels.
I do not agree with DNA testing of everyone coming to the border--that sort of intrusion is worse than separation because you know that authorities are going to keep that DNA on file as well as running it against unsolved cases just in case they get a hit. This is same logic police use when they randomly run your license plate just to see if there are any open warrants against the registered owner of the vehicle.
*************
I have to concur--I see absolutely no logic whatsoever in commuting Blagojevich's sentence. I have never even heard of this other gay, DeBartolo. Let me look....okay, he failed to report a bribe back in 1998. What? Gambling fraud so he could get a riverboat license? erm...okay. What purpose does that serve? *shrug*
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) admitted meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. A little awkward, I have to admit, but the guy is a Senator and the Senate is the body responsible for foreign policy alongside the State Department. He is perfectly within his rights as a Senator to have held that meeting--nothing to see there.
edit/add: wait, he pardoned/commuted Milken as well? The younger folks here won't remember the glory days of Wall Street when junk bonds were everywhere and insider trading was "business as usual". In a bizarre twist of fate, though, Milken made more money *after* getting out of Federal prison than he did before he went in.
that's a sick and demented concept to be sure.
Between 2013-2014 the number of extremely young uac's tripled and at one point they were housing hundreds of toddlers alone at once. They were arriving into a system which they could be abused without consequence and with documented cases of the use of coercion and record falsification to encourage deportation. We don't the extent of the harm done, and likely won't ever. While the very young weren't the majority, and still are not, there was a substantial amount of them.
This clearly doesn't debunk what I said. Family separation remains a fact under the Obama policy, just for more than immigration crimes, as I stated. Having a prior criminal conviction or lack of documents for your kid will get your family separated. This is debunking the specific notion that they are exactly the same, which isn't what I said. In fact we agree on the difference, which is scale.
The problem about speaking to intent is that it is opinion and not fact. I actually agree with you that his motives were probably not good but I could say the same of Obama who you ascribe good intentions to. Which is something of a pattern, I tend to agree with your criticisms of republicans just not your defenses of the left.
Was there a good reason to fail to investigate the destruction of documents, the use of coercion on kids to encourage deportation, rampant physical and sexual abuse, and inhumane conditions during his time? I mean, if we're going to be using our opinions about intent as relevant facts here, I think this doesn't bode well for that argument. He clearly allowed harm on a systemic scale to continue without consequence. Did he do it as a punitive measure? Or did he do it to save his own reputation and avoid the bad publicity?
I don't deny the policy is punitive and immoral. I just see little in the way of difference between the two in practice, and I certainly wouldn't consider calling either one well intentioned. I think both of them were indifferent. Trump's intent wasn't to be malicious towards kids but to punish illegal entry in all cases, that was the intentional deterrent, and he didn't care about them so he was willing to trade off their risk for his benefit.
Obama was willing to violations of federal and international law on humane treatment to continue to be violated on his watch most likely to avoid bad publicity, not malicious, but self interested.
Nope, nope, and nope. The conditions were just as bad if not worse. The crowding conditions are relatively the same with the highest numbers being in 2014 and 2019. They were consistently denied basic amenities and far, far worse during the Obama years.
We wouldn't have to retread these things if you weren't, you know, wrong. It's a perfect symbol of the reflexive need to defend anyone on the left even if it means denying basic realities.
And if you don't like it, don't comment. I'm certainly not obligated to go the standard route and rage about Trump all the time.
This is what the Obama years looked like at the border. He also had more children coming in, as a percentage and total, than the years of Trump.
...but State Attorneys General *can* do something about them. Presidential pardons can not and do not apply to State prosecutions. Of course, the statute of limitations for the crime in question must not have expired and the crime must have occurred in the State in question--DeBartolo committed crimes in Louisiana so he could not be charged in New York...unless, of course, there is some sort of wire fraud in question and the other end of the fraud happened in New York.
"Human smugglers have contributed to the rise in families and children by offering discounted fees to adults who travel with children. Smugglers can drop them at the border and instruct them to claim asylum rather than guiding them across and trying to evade Border Patrol."
People who advocate for unlimited immigration never seem to get around to addressing the human trafficking which goes on at the border. They also often seem to think that every asylum seeker is telling the truth, which is naive. Anyway...the Tribune has reporters in cities along the border so they are on the front line of immigration when they report. I don't always like the Tribune but there are some issues where they are better than any other news source.
I can agree with most of this. I've no particular interest in defending Obama and agree that there were plenty of things that went wrong on his watch.
You said previously though "Just don't pretend the bulk of this wasn't already done before and the only difference is more people were getting caught up in it." I'm not pretending in the least when I say that the difference is not just that far more families were split up by Trump's policy, but that the policy itself is qualitatively different.
Splitting up families because you think that's in the best interests of the children is something most modern governments do (not just to immigrants - children may be removed from abusive parents by social services for example). Splitting up families with, at best, no regard for the interests of the children and, at worst, a deliberate intention to harm the children (in order to teach others a lesson) is not something most modern governments do. There have been episodes of that sort of behavior in the past where governments have engaged in highly dubious social engineering experiments, e.g. the Irish children of single mothers sent to Australia or the indigenous Canadian children forcibly separated from their parents - but the past is where those sorts of policies should have remained.
I agree with this, but I should have made it more clear. The nature of it as a deterrent was unique and was unacceptable. I just don't think that distinction is a massive moral difference from the myriad of other ways the entire border situation is deeply flawed.
disclosure: my father was a womanizer and my mother was a doormat who never stood up to him. I don't have a great view of parents in general, despite accidentally becoming one via marriage. At best, my standard operating procedure was "don't do what they did", which actually isn't the best plan.
Trump overturned justice to 11, including Michael Milken (the Junk Bond King) and Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat, worked with Trump on “The Celebrity Apprentice” in 2010.
Banana Republicans are destroying the rule of law in America.
Disgusting.
It's difficult enough to get rich people to face justice and Trump has shown that even if you do get convicted he'll toss out the sentence.
If Epstein hadn't died in Barr's custody Trump would surely have pardoned his old friend.
No wonder more than 2000 former Justice Department employees are demanding Barr resign and Trump quit undermining American justice.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/1100-doj-officials-call-william-barr-resign/story?id=69030388
And a group of federal judges are calling an emergency meeting to deal with the destruction of American justice by Republicans.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/department-of-justice-roger-stone-federal-judges-association-emergency-meeting-today-2020-02-18/
I'm not providing additional evidence because I've refuted the claims in the past. You can directly compare the number of people held at the border facilities. You can compare the amount of time, and you can see that Trump's administration attempted to prevent them from having basic needs met. In all 3 situations, the conditions are objectively worse under this administration.
I'm not obligated to respond. I'm also not obligated to point out when you're wrong. Doesnt mean I wont.
I'm sure in 6 months we'll all get to revisit the topic when someone get reflexively upset that Trump is being castigated for doing something that Breitbart says Obama actually did.
If crossing the border wasn't a crime, you wouldn't have to try to trust criminals to cross it.
I like how you are making a strong argument for open borders.
It's not my cup of tea but I'd say we can do better than driving people to resort to criminal means of crossing the border. This is supposed to be America, the land of immigrants, give us your poor tired, yada yada yada.
This argument has really fallen to a new low if longer wait times is the lynchpin for the case that it was categorically worse.
I have a better metric to use: abuse. There were four times as many proven cases of sexual abuse under Obama's reign than under Trumps. This comes straight from the HHS statistics on unaccompanied minors.
His logic is “I can do this and nothing is going to stop me.”
It wouldn’t surprise me if he is selling pardons for campaign donations, although I personally can’t prove that.
If he is doing that then that's bribery, another impeachable offense explicitly defined in the Constitution. Of course Republicans stand for nothing and are highly conflicted partisan hacks and so they won't do anything about it. Maybe they'll slightly be concerned and then go nothing.
Trump has pardoned Arpaio, D’Souza, DeBartolo and Kerik, commuted Blagojevich’s sentence, and will probably do the same for Roger Stone. So apparently when he said he was going to drain the swamp he meant drain it into our drinking water.
(emphasis mine)
First off, this is a false choice. You could limit it to families or even offer families voluntary testing to not get separated - though in the case of adopted children that is not fool-proof.
Beyond that and more importantly, I am frankly appalled how far values seem to differ here. I do not know a single parent who given the choice between his country (or another one entirely) obtaining his DNA or being separated from their children for months (maybe forever) would not choose keeping the kids. If you are taking their children away is worse than taking their DNA our value systems are fundamentally incompatible.
The son of one of Trump’s pardon recipients gave $85k to Trump victory this August. His wife gave $50k that same month. On top of that, they made an in-kind contribution for $75k in air travel.
Trump Got Tons of Campaign Cash Before Handing Out Pardons
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-grants-clemency-to-another-round-of-people-he-saw-on-fox-news?ref=home
Impeach him again.