For Trump and Co., doing it “right out in the open” was the point. Performative prejudice, e.g. the Kristallnacht is how you get an enthusiastic minority to dominate and cow a mostly indifferent majority.
Stranger
Not did it. Are doing it, I’m afraid.
Is this not getting much media coverage because Biden gets a pass on this because he’s trying to make it better? Or, because right-wing media can’t make this an issue (since they won’t point out ways that Biden is hurting immigrants) and normal media doesn’t want to hurt Biden? Or because it’s old news?
Dunno, a mix of the first two? I don’t know if right wing news has had anything to say about it, but I can see how it’s sort of a mixed message for them. Probably not a big seller compared to just making stuff up about rampaging caravans.
Probably also not a big seller for reputable news outlets; it would make their core audience mad and get them accused of doing both-sidesism. Seems like there’s really no market at all for a headline that’s like “Biden does do things differently from Trump, but actually the thing everybody was mad about is still happening, and nobody is really even attempting a non-cosmetic solution because nobody is really interested in fundamental change in either direction.”
I don’t remember seeing much uproar when Republicans forced Biden to back away entirely from offering any compensation to the separated families, either. I don’t have a sense of where the average American voter comes down on immigration at the end of the day. It’s so easy to be mad about stuff when Trump is loudly and racistly doing it.
I never got as much media coverage as it should have IMHO, even when it was first happening. There was not the huge public outcry that this demanded. And it was quickly displaced by other daily shocking/atrocious news items-- hundreds of them.
I truly don’t think it’s because Biden “gets a pass” or “normal media doesn’t want to hurt Biden.” Give me a break. The MSM never misses a chance to criticize him, 'cause that’s what the Fourth Estate is supposed to do-- criticize the administration.
I think it’s compassion fatigue. Just one more horrible thing that human beings are doing to other human beings. People can only tolerate so much. And yeah, that makes it “old news.”
The other problem is that there really isn’t any good solution to this whole thing.
Legally, asylum seekers are supposed to be allowed into the country, then detained while they are being processed, but children aren’t supposed to be detained more than 72 hours. Given how back-logged the asylum process is there is no way to actually follow the law without sending the children off somewhere. Even then there aren’t enough detainment centers to comply with the law, so we are rapidly approaching the point where the laws of the United states are in direct conflict with the laws of reality. What really needs to happen is for the law to change but the chances of that are slim to none and slim’s left town.
Note that I’m not saying what what Biden is doing is good, or even that its the least bad, I’m simply stating that there is no good solution. The main difference I see between the Biden and Trump administrations, is that with Biden the pain and suffering is seen as an unfortunate side effect of our messed up immigration system, while with Trump it was the primary goal.
Are you sure the law states they have to be detained? What is the definition of detained?
Note I’m not an expert so there may be subtleties I’m missing, but I saw this several places, for example from wikipedia
Mandatory detention was officially authorized by President Bill Clinton in 1996, with the enactment of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty (which gave the Attorney General discretion to extend detention) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility acts.
I read elsewhere that the first act was written in response to the Oklahoma city bombing. What the heck that had to do with Immigration I have no idea.
And by “we”, you must mean the small minority of Americans who cheered on when this happened in America but are supporting the defense of Ukraine now, and not the over 50% or more of americans who were against both, nor the pro-Russian far right and far left who agree with either Russian or both Russian and American actions.
Bad as our immigration policy is, its still no where near as bad as what Russia is doing. As far as I know (please correct me if I’m wrong), the families who enter the assylum process did so of their own free will We have yet to invade Mexico and kidnap children from their homes to use as human shields.
A cursory reading of that link seems to say that illegal immigrants asking for asylum do not have to be detained, but can be detained, for instance if they are deemed a threat to national security. There is leeway in the appllication of this law, but still: that really sucks.
And Bill Clinton signed it. And no president deported more people than Obama. Of course Trump is such a horrible being that he can only be properly described in The Pit if at all, so I am not going to try here, and I am not for whataboutism, but I see some institutionalizing of an inhuman policy here that is most depressing.
Don’t give them ideas! Come to think of that again, the best deterrent against that is that it would be expensive. They won’t do it until they find a way to take a cut.
Under current law, detention is mandatory for asylum seekers in almost all cases, because there’s no exception for them to the general rule, which is that when somebody shows up who might be someone who isn’t allowed to be there, they get detained. By virtue of the fact that they’re seeking asylum, these are people who are unlikely to be able to come in legally otherwise. So that means that if someone wants asylum, they almost certainly qualify for mandatory detention.
I don’t think it’s true that they never miss a chance. I’m also not sure I agree that’s really what the fourth estate is “supposed” to do. But more than all that, we have very different opinions of American mainstream media if you think that the fact the media is supposed to do something means that’s what they do!
Rightwing politicians are already talking about bombing Mexico or sending in Special Forces or something along those lines.† So this isn’t too far from what they’re already proposing.
† To stop fentanyl manufacturing.
They just need to change the law, just a provision to not separate families. It won’t happen until there’s enough pressure, and there won’t be pressure until there’s coverage.
I think that part of the problem was blaming Trump. Granted, I am pretty much always down for that, but in this case if the messaging is “look what Trump is doing” it just bleeds into the “Trump is bad” narrative, and then the solution is “vote him out of office, make him pay”.
But it’s not about what Trump is doing, and the solution isn’t defeating him. It’s about what the country is doing, regardless of who’s in charge. This needs to become a big issue that stays in the public consciousness. And it should be a bipartisan issue, because it’s an excuse for both sides to blame each other.
UPDATE.
[Disclaimer: This gift link from The Atlantic online is supposed to be good for 14 days. Today is Dec 11. Don’t know if they will ask you to register or something.]
On Friday, a federal judge in Southern California certified a settlement between the government and thousands of migrant children and parents who were rent from one another by the Trump administration as part of its immigration crackdown. Judge Dana Sabraw’s decision ended a years-long legal battle, ultimately giving the families almost everything they’d asked for: The settlement bars U.S. immigration authorities from taking children away from their parents under almost any circumstance for eight years and provides the families who were separated the right to return and seek asylum in the U.S., as well as government-funded legal representation, and temporary housing and health care. The ACLU, which litigated the case on behalf of separated families, called it the most important settlement in the organization’s 103-year history. But Sabraw underscored in his decision that family separations never should have happened, and that no number of resources can undo the harm they caused.
As with most of the hearings in the case over the past six years, the gathering on Friday began with an eerie counting of kids. The government explained that since its last “status update,” it had found or resolved the cases of four noncitizen children, bringing the number of those whose parents have been altogether lost by U.S. authorities down to 68. Urging the government to keep looking, Sabraw repeated a line he has said many times: “Every child who is not found is permanently orphaned.”
Judge Sabraw took the hearing as an opportunity to reflect on what he called “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.” He recalled that when the case first landed in front of him in February 2018, he could hardly believe the ACLU’s allegations against the government, because they sounded “sensational.”
…
I probably can’t legitimately quote any more. It’s a short article. I hope it’s accessible.
My bold.
“Sensational”?? Ha! In TrumpWorld, this is small beer.
Here’s another mind-blowing quote from the article:
…
Another major impediment to reunifications was that the policy’s strongest proponents, including Matt Albence, a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, actively worked to prevent them from happening. “We can’t have this,” Albence wrote to his colleagues after learning that some reunifications had occurred.
…
Kudos to the ACLU. What an important and worthy organization. They really are the only ones who actually give a shit about what our constitution says.
So what happens after the 8 year window closes and there’s another MAGA nazi in the White House? Forcibly removing children from their families as a sort of collective punishment / deterrent and then “losing” them (really, how???) will again become government policy?
I wondered about that “eight years” thing myself.
RE: ACLU
Note the date: Nov, 2016
NEW YORK ― The American Civil Liberties Union has raised a record amount in donations since Donald Trump was elected to become the next president.
The organization announced Monday that in the past week it has received more than $7.2 million from 120,000 individual donations ― the biggest fundraising haul in the history of the civil liberties group.
“This is the greatest outpouring of support for the ACLU in our nearly 100-year history, greater than the days after 9/11,” Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, said in an emailed statement.
…
There has never been clearer evidence that Trump and Co. consider brown people to be sub-human than when they took children away from their parents. And, then, lost track of the kids. No one involved could possibly consider these immigrants to be fully human, because taking a child from a parent without any sort of process and then losing the child is not something that you do to someone you consider human.
Matt Albence should fucking rot in hell for preventing the reuniting of children with their parents. Or, better yet, have his kids stripped from him and “permanently orphaned”, because Albence is less of a human than any of the people whose lives he destroyed.
I have children. I cannot imagine going through this.
I disagree. What Matt Albence and Donald Trump did was so horrible it shouldn’t even be done to Matt Albence and Donald Trump.