The dam of news reporting on what is going on on the Mexico boarder seemed to break on Sunday. The New York Times provides its first timeline of the family separation policy, with context from the Bush and Obama administrations. John Kelly floated the idea in March 2017 but it was dropped as too controversial. Under him the Department of Homeland Security “quietly tested the approach last summer in certain ares of Texas.”
Laura Bush wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post attaching the policy in strong terms: “These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and non-citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.”
There was also audio recordings of children crying in detention centers.
Trump and his Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielson both made public comments on Monday to defend the family separation program. Congress is beginning to make noises about doing something.
Sessions said on Monday: “If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won’t face these terrible choices.”
By Wednesday, with political pressure mounting, Trump tried to reverse course. Trump signed an Executive Order that he claimed would end family separation at the boarder. What it really means is that families will be detained together, which is against the law after 20 days due to the Flores ruling. No telling what will happen at that point. Also, the order does nothing to reunite the 2000+ families already separated.
While there seems to be indications that families were no longer being separated, the question turned to how families already separated would be reunited.
While all of this was going down, there was much illuminating reporting on exactly what is happening on the boarder. We had the chance to learn this week about the history of the previous Central American immigration surge in 2014. Faced with this problem, and the fear that a larger surge would follow, the Obama administration tried to detain families together, which ran afoul of the Flores ruling. Trump is now facing a much smaller surge, but it is more than last summer, which was historically low.
Here is a good summary of facts about illegal crossings:
- .095% are gang members
- 50% are from Central America
- Most of those are coming from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) fleeing gang violence, and domestic violence particularly in Guatemala
- Central American families and unaccompanied children have constituted on average between 40-60% of the migrants from Central America arriving to the United States, “the families that the Trump administration has focused on separating make up an increasingly high proportion of the migrants who reach the U.S. border.”
- Before Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, 77% of these families were interviewed as “credible fear” cases, proved their case and were released until their asylum hearing–until June 20th they were being separated, and now they are being detained.
Some journalists (black ones, mostly) pointed out that race is a major factor in the family separation policy. Perry Bacon Jr. at 538 pointing out that 14% of Americans are now foreign born, which is a historical high: “According to Gallup, most Republicans want the number of immigrants to go down, while Democrats are both less concerned about immigration overall and increasingly opposed to reducing the number of immigrants.”
And Jamelle Bouie retweeted his article from February 6, 2017, which reads like reverse science-fiction, since is so clearly perceives what Trump is doing in June of 2018 with an article titled “Government by White Nationalism is Upon Us” written a few weeks after Trump’s inauguration.
Stephen Miller gets a lot of attention in these race-related articles, probably because he is most honest about what he believes. He said to the New York Times that the family separation policy was good politics for Trump: “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border. And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border.”
In non-boarder news, It was reported that Commerce Secretary Wilber Ross used insider knowledge to short stock, which may be a legal issue for him down the road.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%