1849

A youth care worker for Southwest Key has been charged with 11 sex offenses after authorities accused him of molesting at least eight unaccompanied immigrant boys over nearly a year at one of the company’s shelters in Mesa, Arizona, federal court records show.

The allegations against Levian D. Pacheco, who is HIV-positive, include that he performed oral sex on two of the teenagers and tried to force one of them to penetrate him anally. The other six teens — all between 15 and 17 — said Pacheco had groped them through their clothing. All of the incidents are alleged to have taken place between August 2016 and July 2017, according to a court filing last week that laid out the government’s case.

The case, initially investigated by local police, is now proceeding through U.S. District Court in Phoenix. Pacheco had worked at Southwest Key’s Casa Kokopelli shelter, one of eight the company runs in Arizona, since May 2016.

1850

You have got to be shitting me

1851

The ACLU was not amused.

1852

Nor was the Judge:

1853

And even worse for Trump…

One shutdown excuse gone…

1854

My only fault of both the ACLU and the Judge in this case is not being aggressive enough in assessing penalties.

If I was the ACLU, I would have asked the government to pay say $500/per day a child is separated from their parents. I further would have directed the money be taken from the bonus pool that is available for senior employee in DHS. Me thinks if there pay was directly affected that would have encouraged them to move quicker. I also would have threaten contempt of court citations and jail senior officials if the really screwed up.
(I don’t think DHS response has been bad enough to throw Kristen in jail, but definitely bad enough to dock their pay.)

1855

Even though the policy is hitting close to home, Temo Juarez said he doesn’t blame Trump for tearing his family apart. The self-described "super conservative” Republican voted for Trump but said he didn’t think the billionaire’s election would hasten his wife’s deportation.

“I ate my words," he said. "Obviously, when Trump came in, everybody is [a] priority now.”

1856

I like that plan.

1857

Critical hit!

1858

That guy is dumb, but it’s seriously messed up that we are deporting the wife of a veteran.

Cadet bone spurs strikes again.

1859

I want to feel for this guy and his family, but he voted for Trump. He felt perfectly fine to have this done to other families, just not his.

1860

Yes, that’s a great way to view these ‘face eaten by leopard’ stories. All these people were happy to vote for leopards eating someone else’s face.

1861

This kind of thing is exactly what I was talking about in the “Hillbilly Elegy” thread @scuzz

1862

The official story of the Trump administration’s family separation policy is that it came about as a result of “zero tolerance” in which every person who could be charged with a crime would be, and that meant that parents were arrested too, and since the parents were going to jail, their kids had to be held somewhere.

But as Congress has delved into the process, grilling the Trump officials who enforced the policy, an even crueler, more awful picture has emerged.

It turns out that border guards charged “less than a third” of the adults who crossed the border since the policy began – but that they preferentially brought charges against parents so they could take their kids away .

BoingBoing’s source is The Intercept, but their source is a TRAC* analysis.

TRAC: “Zero Tolerance” at the Border: Rhetoric vs. Reality

However, since less than a third of adults apprehended illegally crossing the border were actually referred for prosecution, the stated justification does not explain why this Administration chose to prosecute parents with children over prosecuting adults without children who were also apprehended in even larger numbers. As shown in Table 1, the total number of adults apprehended without children during May 2018 was 24,465. This is much larger than the 9,216 adults that the administration chose to prosecute that month.

Thus, the so-called zero-tolerance policy didn’t as a practical matter eliminate prosecutorial discretion. Since less than one out of three adults were actually prosecuted, CBP personnel had to choose which individuals among those apprehended to refer to federal prosecutors[4]. The Administration has not explained its rationale for prosecuting parents with children when that left so many other adults without children who were not being referred for prosecution.

* Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse

1863

Next up: restricting legal immigration:

The Trump administration is expected to issue a proposal in coming weeks that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare, four sources with knowledge of the plan told NBC News.

The move, which would not need Congressional approval, is part of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to limit the number of migrants who obtain legal status in the U.S. each year…

Immigration lawyers and advocates and public health researchers say it would be the biggest change to the legal immigration system in decades and estimate that more than 20 million immigrants could be affected. They say it would fall particularly hard on immigrants working jobs that don’t pay enough to support their families.

God forbid that if you pay your taxes and follow the rules you should, gasp, actually use the services the government provides.

There is no public support for this. Legal immigration is wildly popular. 85% of Americans think legal immigration is good for the country and support for restricting legal immigration is at its lowest level since 1965, according to Gallup.

Not that Miller cares; while the White House burns he’s just trying to put in every pro-white-nationalist policy he can.

1864

How much you want to bet that Trump supporters are going to start changing their tune on legal immigration soon?

1865

This makes about as much sense as abandoning the Iran deal and then unilaterally trying to put sanctions back in place.

All the data I’ve ever seen on the subject shows that immigration is a big positive for the country. Common sense says we need more of it with our declining birthrates (Hello, Japan). This makes absolutely no sense from a policy perspective, unless the policy is “I’m a xenophobic hater of the Other”. Which of course is the case with these guys.

1866

Trump supporters will support literally whatever Trump tells them to support.

Literally anything. They would support punching themselves in the nuts if Trump said it would make America great.

1867

Fuck, I’d 100% support this too. Please let this be in tomorrow’s tweet session!

1868

How did we end up with someone like Stephen Miller having any power at all? I really can’t fathom how someone so clearly evil at his core is helping create the policy of the United States of America.

We are no longer the good guys.