Trump immigrant family separation policy

That is absolutely the way law enforcement works in this country. Cops don't pull over random people because they might be in a stolen car. They don't get to confiscate people's guns because they might be murder weapons.

All I'm saying is that if a government agent is going to place a child in custody, they should have a reasonable suspicion that the child was the victim of or perpetrator of a crime. Feel free to disagree with that one if you want.

You think these people are picked up walking out of a Taco Bell?
 
That is absolutely the way law enforcement works in this country. Cops don't pull over random people because they might be in a stolen car. They don't get to confiscate people's guns because they might be murder weapons.

All I'm saying is that if a government agent is going to place a child in custody, they should have a reasonable suspicion that the child was the victim of or perpetrator of a crime. Feel free to disagree with that one if you want.

Goodness, I usually agree with you and I hate the current policy, but I think you're wrong here. If one's parents are taken into custody and no one else is available, then the child would be taken into custodial care.

Like I said, the fact that Sessions has decided to take every family into custody is a bad move, but I think that your description of the effect is mistaken.
 
Goodness, I usually agree with you and I hate the current policy, but I think you're wrong here. If one's parents are taken into custody and no one else is available, then the child would be taken into custodial care.

Like I said, the fact that Sessions has decided to take every family into custody is a bad move, but I think that your description of the effect is mistaken.
Think any effort has been made to see if any friends or family are available?:rolleyes:

Here are a couple pertinent facts you are leaving out:

One, they are being charged, I do believe one gets a hearing before being convicted.

And even if without any rights to a trial, they are convicted, it's a minor misdemeanor charge. You don't lose your kids because you are convicted of a misdemeanor.

First time offense for a misdemeanor, and you have kids with you, you will get probation or a suspended sentence or no time.

Two, if you are arrested and your kids are with you, you have a chance to call relatives to come get the kids. They are not whisked off into social services custody if you have relatives or friends that can come pick them up, I don't care if they are citizens or not. Hell, half the right-wingers wanted Elian Gonzales to stay with FL relatives. No one said, he's not a citizen, deport him to Cuba.

Some of those kids had relatives in the US.

Three, it's not American to use children as hostages. What friggin country do you live in? What, just because they are brown they are non-people? You know what they are being held hostage for (besides disgusting unethical reasons), Trump believes he will get mid-term votes out of it. Because the alt-whiters believe the false stats that if these immigrants are let out with court dates they don't show up for court.

That turns out to be a lie, the majority do indeed return for their asylum court hearings.

Calling it catch and release? Really, talk about trigger framing. They are people, not fish.
 
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No, but that isn’t the way law enforcement works. Are you going to be the border patrol agent that lets one get by?

So if a family can produce evidence they are related, like cell phone photos, do you think they should not be detained and separated?
 
If we're going to be honest, this catastrophe falls squarely on the shoulders of the first Democrat ever. And that Democrat's name was Jesus.
If you want to get technical, "God" rips children from the arms of their parents every day.
The under-five mortality rate for the world is 40.8 deaths according to the World Bank and the World Health Organization. 5.6 million children under age five died in 2016, 15 000 every day.
 
So if a family can produce evidence they are related, like cell phone photos, do you think they should not be detained and separated?
Some of those smugglers are so dedicated to their craft that they breast feed the infants they are smuggling. It's amazing. :rolleyes:
 
It's being reported here in the UK that the Republican bill to address the situation contains a couple of rather controversial points:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44543252

1) $25bn for border security - including the Trump border wall

If that's the case then the President's blackmail was successful. Of course Mexico was supposed to pay for it, but that ship would never have sailed in any case

2) Formalising separation of children

The bill would allegedly limit child separation, but not ban it altogether. Knowing how little legislators read, and the "give an inch, take a mile" approach adopted by this administration against immigrants, I'd suggest that gives the green light for the indefinite separation of parents and children in the majority of cases

The GOP is showing its true colours once again. I have been wrong when I thought that the majority of GOP legislators were just cowards afraid of being primaried and that a lot of GOP supporters were supporting Trump through mistaken partisanship. It turns out that both groups are active supporters of his policies (along with a significant minority of independents) and that around 40% of people in the US are openly racist an white supremacist - I stand corrected :(
 
Is this the point where we can stop pretending that conservatives have any shred of humanity in them? Is creating child concentration camps intended only for cruelty the line they cross when we write them off as human beings worth sharing a nation with?


I think we liberals need to seriously ponder those questions.

That's a bit of a cheap shot at conservatives. Some of the strongest condemnations of this policy have come from conservatives. This is a question of being loyal to the nation and our values or not. You can be loyal to our values and be conservative. You cannot be loyal to this country and support this president and his policies.
 
That's a bit of a cheap shot at conservatives. Some of the strongest condemnations of this policy have come from conservatives. This is a question of being loyal to the nation and our values or not. You can be loyal to our values and be conservative. You cannot be loyal to this country and support this president and his policies.

And yet the conservatives are putting together a bill which gives President Trump $25bn for border security (including the wall) and allows separation of parents and children - they're enabling his blackmailing.

A true condemnation would not provide him with a generous quid pro quo for dropping what is allegedly* a very controversial policy.

* - I guess we'll see. Although the US electorate are supposed to be against it, large scale opposition seems to have been quite muted.
 
* - I guess we'll see. Although the US electorate are supposed to be against it, large scale opposition seems to have been quite muted.

The thing is separation of parents and children is in some cases justified. Jeff Sessions is simply abusing an existing law in place to protect children from criminal parents.

It's difficult to make a simple alternative and public rarely rallies behind a complex alternative. That's why the large scale opposition is muted.

McHrozni
 
Saw a bit on some news channel yesterday. Two groups of Trump supporters were interviewed, one in a restaurant, the other in a bar, I think. The former were middle-aged or older white folk. The latter were 20-something professionals, two or three of them being people of color/children of immigrants. The former had kids and grandkids. The latter had none.

Who do you think were the less sympathetic to the plight of the children being taken from their parents?

Yep. The fat, priveleged, old, angry white folk stuffing their avaricious, ignorant faces with cholesterol. Those are the *********** deplorables. And I'm a middle-aged white guy myself. Goddamned disgusting.
 
The thing is separation of parents and children is in some cases justified. Jeff Sessions is simply abusing an existing law in place to protect children from criminal parents.

It's difficult to make a simple alternative and public rarely rallies behind a complex alternative. That's why the large scale opposition is muted.

McHrozni

True.

And there are a lot of people who view all illegal immigrants as subhumans. Always mentioning MS-13 when referring to Hispanic people is just part of the process - as, no doubt, is exaggerating the threat that MS-13 presents to US society.

As far as brown people go....

Immigrants = Illegals = Gangbangers = Threat to society

And so any and all actions are justified...
 
https://twitter.com/JProskowGlobal/status/1009119915348021249

NEW: I just spoke with the former head of US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) – He tells me that he expects hundreds of separated children will never be reunited with their parents. They will be lost in the system. Orphaned by the US Govt'.

He says that during his time at ICE there were rare cases where children could not be reunited with their parents. Separation becomes permanent. This was *before* Trump’s policy that has so far separated 2300+ children from their parents.

He adds there are two separate legal tracks for children and adult migrants who are detained. Adults can be deported within weeks to their home countries, children may be left in the US for years in foster care or with relatives.

"there’s very little that we in the United States can do to deter people who are fleeing this horrific violence in Central America to stop them trying to come here" John Sandweg told me.

“there’s so little that we can do that’s worse than what they are facing” Sandweg says, based on his experience at ICE.

"the federal government is not very good at keeping track of kids and parents.” he says.

"if the administration doesn’t reunify these children very quickly, which is logistically very hard to do, you’re going to have a lot of permanent separations."

"I think we’re going to see hundreds of cases where children are permanently separated from their parents, becoming wards of the United States"

One final thought from the former head of ICE: "I don’t understand why we’re doing this. From a border security perspective this adds nothing to securing our borders”

On child separation, former acting director of ICE John Sandweg said "the other thing that scares me Jackson, is I’m not seeing any signs that this was a planned policy change ... and I think that’s being reflected by these horrific detention facilities"

There's a transcript and a video embedded in the last couple of tweets in that thread.

And it feeds in to the question I asked right at the start of this thread, and which nobody has been able to answer - who actually benefits from this policy? How does it make America safer, or better? It seems that the reason nobody who is defending this policy can answer those questions is because the answers are "nobody" and "it doesn't", respectively.

It really is just being cruel for the sake of being cruel in hopes that it will act as a "deterrent", even though ICE's own internal documents show that it isn't.
 
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True.

And there are a lot of people who view all illegal immigrants as subhumans. Always mentioning MS-13 when referring to Hispanic people is just part of the process - as, no doubt, is exaggerating the threat that MS-13 presents to US society.

The greatest threat MS-13 presents to US society is what it's doing now, promoting xenophobia and destroying the liberal world order as a result.

As far as brown people go....

Immigrants = Illegals = Gangbangers = Threat to society

And so any and all actions are justified...

Yeah. And there is no easy solution for that. Once the Pandoras' box is open it's hard to put the evil back in - it'll take decades at least.
Usually wars or major crises are how these things ended. I'm not looking forward to that.

McHrozni
 
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Get a *********** ladder and take down the Statue of liberty.
Cynics can now have no end of fun amending Emma Lazarus's sonnet The New Colossus, written to raise funding for the Statue of Liberty, and now displayed on that monument. The original manuscript is held by the American Jewish Historical Society, who may want to make a present of it to Trump, as a timely reminder. But they can amend it a bit before doing so, as I have done in bold here...

Here at our guarded lockfast gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose shame
Is the imprisoned children, and her name
EXCLUDER OF EXILES ...

Keep these, the homeless, tempest-tost from me,
I douse my lamp beside the bolted door!

Lazarus was a Zionist before Herzl, by the way. She was radicalised by the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing from the Russian pogroms. Per wiki.

Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George Eliot novel Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 ... An important forerunner of the Zionist movement, Lazarus argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term "Zionism".​
 
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