I don’t say this often or lightly, but where the hell is a damn “like” button when I need one?
Menzo
3072
I believe Bill Murray said it best.
Oghier
3073
When someone is willing to pack all their stuff in a plastic bag, swim a river or cross a desert into another country to do backbreaking work to support their family… that’s a person we need. They’re an economic resource.
But that argument falls flat with Trumplings. They only care if those immigrants are white. It’s not an economic issue to them so much as a cultural one.
This American Life featured a harrowing immigration story this week. It didn’t involve the southern border, though. A Laotian woman, 19 years of age, flew to O’Hare in transit to the Twin Cities to marry her fiance. However, Customs and Border Patrol agents thought she looked much younger than nineteen. They didn’t let her continue her travels. They gave her a new birthday, so that she was a minor in the eyes of the United States government, and her adventures became what could charitably be called a Kafkaesque nightmare.
(Edit: I mean, sure, if I was a Border Control agent and saw a very young-looking woman asserting that she was over eighteen, and I had some mandate to control human trafficking, I might want to be very sure that her story checked out. But these guys went way beyond checking out her story, all the way to rewriting her story so that the new story checked out and the old one could be ignored.)
Timex
3075
This is exactly right. That is the kind of person who makes the country better.
And really, that’s the kind of person who we used to celebrate. The down on their luck common man who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Hell, that’s exactly what the GOP says folks need to do. These refugees are walking the walk that the GOP voters talk about. When Reagan used to talk about immigrants and refugees, he didn’t look down on then. He celebrated them. They all wanted to come here, because America’s the best place on Earth. And there’s no finite amount of what makes America great. There’s no finite amount of freedom. Every immigrant who comes here, makes us stronger. And those people risked way more than any native born American did for that chance. Hell, some of them come here and then join our military, literally fighting for their new home.
I know my high regard for Reagan is not commonly held among most here, but on this part of being president? On this part of understanding what America is? He had that right. And it was his ability to deliver that kind of message that i think informed a lot of my own views regarding America. And even today, witnessing Trump, i do not regret any of that part of my political education. It’s that stuff which, if there is something which was once good at the heart of the GOP, it’s that idea of America.
If i have to pick between that guy, and some fat Boomer sitting on his ass, watching Fox news? Or playing golf? It isn’t even a choice. I’d make that trade in a second.
Of course, hating immigrants is just as old as immigration itself, even here. We all have to fight, tooth and nail, to get in through that door… And then we seem to all immediately want to slam it behind us.
Trump doesn’t think of women as people.
Citizenship Question perma-banned:
How does that jibe with the SCOTUS decision holding that the Administration could do so with a not-transparently-specious reason?
Matt_W
3085
This article, about leadership and oversight failures that have plagued CBP since it was created, is really good.
CBP recruited that new army by lowering its hiring standards—already the lowest among top federal law enforcement agencies—and shoveling agents through the academy and into the field before even completing background checks. “We weren’t prepared,” one former training officer told me. Agents called it “No Trainee Left Behind.” Management structures and processes failed, oversight lessened and by the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years. Already at that point, agent misconduct and criminality were on the rise—the lax hiring standards and background checks had populated the new border army with the wrong sort of person. “We made some mistakes,” Bush’s CBP Commissioner Ralph Basham told me in 2014. “We found out later that we did, in fact, hire cartel members.”
Ronald Hosko, a former FBI assistant director who headed the bureau’s criminal division, told me that at one CBP meeting he attended in 2012, top agency officials estimated that perhaps as much as 20 percent of CBP’s agent and officer corps needed to be removed from the force. In response, the FBI declared border corruption—e.g., investigating another federal law enforcement agency—as its top priority in combating public corruption.
More recently, there was the Texas Border Patrol agent arrested and charged last year with being a serial killer, responsible, prosecutors say, for the deaths of at least four women, all sex workers, around Laredo, Texas. That agent, Juan David Ortiz, appears to have shot the women with his CBP-issued handgun, a .40-caliber HK P2000.
The union, meanwhile, has often resisted efforts to modernize and update use of force policies and bring more transparency to officer-involved shootings. When CBP announced it would recognize officers and agents who de-escalate confrontations and avoid using deadly force, the union called the new award “despicable” and said it “will get Border Patrol agents killed.”
That bellicose attitude is propped up by a long-standing damaging insular culture that tolerates and protects wrongdoers. In 2016, an outside advisory group headed by New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton concluded, “The CBP discipline system is broken.” It noted, among other problems, that CBP doesn’t have any systems to monitor or suspend employees arrested for domestic violence or alcohol abuse, standard practice for police departments nationwide. Bratton’s advisory group noted that CBP’s discipline system was less rigorous, in fact, for its armed officers and agents than the Transportation Security Administration’s system for its unarmed airport screeners.
That CBP’s internal culture had problems would hardly have been a surprise to agency leaders, right down to the routine dehumanization of the very people they’re tasked with helping.
Prosecutors have revealed that the Border Patrol agent set to go on trial next month for running down a border crosser referred to immigrants as “mindless, murdering savages.” Border Patrol agents routinely call migrants or detainees “tonks,” a moniker that agents joke stems from the sound a detainee’s head makes when hit with a flashlight, and such racist terms even surface in the agency’s academy.
Burn the whole thing down and then shoot it into the Sun. Of course DJT probably would love all the shit in the article if he weren’t too fucking lazy to read it, or even to have someone give him a three sentence oral briefing of the article.
Clay
3087
Support our Vets! Except for these ones!
The administration is no longer planning to add a citizenship question to the census, so the DOJ did not oppose to the order. It applies only to the 2020 census. We get to have this fight again in 2029, if we are still living under Conservative rule.
Banzai
3089
wanna bet that the census takers are directed to ask a question for a different survey than the census that just happens to be the citizenship question?
or that a new nationwide survey is performed just prior to the census in order to ask the question?
they wont let the court thwart their ill will. theyll find some other way to reduce participation in the census. having correct numbers is too dangerous for their fragile minority rule.
Or ask the question before they do a survey. “Are you an American citizen? No, ok, have a nice day then. Thanks for the iced tea.”
