Jeff Sessions, Attorney General. If you did not see this, you literally did no searching.
You have attempted to point this out, but many posts in this and the other thread have demonstrated that this is a false equivalence. In general you have not even made a token effort at actually addressing any of these posts. These are quite simply not the same thing.
A woman whose crime is requesting asylum was separated from her child for over a month and is currently suing the government to find out the location of the child. This is not “very normal.”
Is that fucking clear enough for you?
Sage Rat, will you ask a moderator to close this thread, since it’s now clear that the law does not require separating children, given the Executive Order? Or, are you going to write your congressperson and ask him/her to start impeachment proceedings, since Trump must be violating the law with this Executive Order?
Or, are you going to admit you were wrong, the law does not require it, the administration was doing this on purpose as a deterrent and to have a bargaining chip to get funding for the Wall (the one that Mexico is paying for), and are heartless monsters?
Just FYI, I had a quick conversation with Harry Turtledove this morning and he agrees that they are, in fact, concentration camps.
On one hand, I got a guy who has made a career out of recasting two wars (Civil War and WW2), wars in which racial and ethnic issues played a major part, saying these camps are, in fact, concentration camps.
On the other hand, I have Trump supporters denying they are.
God! Who should I listen to here??? The experts or the ideologues?
Check the quotation marks. Inputting their own spin on the quoted material is probably exactly what Sage was referring to.
Here is the quote from Kelly:
And here is the quote from Sessions:
Bolding mine.
How is that not direct, convincing evidence that this policy was implementing with the intention of serving as a deterrent/punishment for parents? In the face of that, how can anyone continue to hold that the abrupt rise in separations was some unanticipated, incidental consequence of an unrelated policy?
That helps , thanks!
This falls in the same realm as when a state bans abortion, knowing that it will probably get shot down by the Supreme Court, but it gives them points with their base and there’s no penalty for knowingly writing laws that will be struck down. And, unless a judge puts an emergency stay on a law like that, while it’s making its way through the courts, it is in a sense “legal”.
In this case, it doesn’t seem impossible that the judge who made the Flores decision will revise the decision.
For the moment, the Executive Order is “legal”, to the best of my understanding.
As best I can tell, the policy to begin prosecuting people crossing the border started last April. I.e. almost a year and a half ago. At no point in time has the Trump administration been anything but as leaky as a sieve, but at that time in particular there was still a large number of Obama appointees, faithful professionals, and people with a working moral compass in the Executive branch.
If, at that time, there had been discussions about purposefully separating families to punish immigrants, it would have been in the news.
In April of last year, there is no chance whatsoever that the Trump administration was so organized as to pore over the immigration laws and find a particular, legal mechanism for breaking up families. They would simply issue an order to that effect, because the hell with patience and planning. Even today that are not that organized, and if they had wanted to do such a thing at the time, they would have been reliant on all of the legacy Obama appointees, faithful professionals, and those with a working moral compass to do that digging. As said, it would have been leaked, if it had been a policy goal.
In April of last year, if Trump had wanted this done - as said - he would simply have issued a direct order that it be done and the rest of the Executive branch would have had to scurry to find some sort of legal pretext to do it after the fact, and the border patrol would have immediately started throwing kids into whatever holding cells they had, be it a jail, cage, or whatever else because it would be a direct order that had no detailed process for undertaking the task. This would have immediately been in the news and everyone would be talking about it as Travel Ban 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Instead, it quietly occurred for over a year, following a very strict process that was perfected by the Obama administration - for those cases where they used their prosecutorial discretion to arrest and prosecute an immigrant who had children with him - and wasn’t noticed by anyone until the numbers started to exceed what the existing infrastructure could support by too much.
If it had been a goal of the administration then, when it was discovered, Trump would have admitted it and would have long since forgotten what legal mumbo-jumbo it was that they were using to justify the act. He would not issue a tweet of surprise, a disavowal, and an attack on the one piece of the legal puzzle that happened to involve a Democrat unless it had just been explained to him shortly before.
That said, from reporting I have seen since the start of the thread it seems likely that Kelly and Miller were at some point made aware that this would be the result of the policy and they quietly approved it. They did not seek to find a way to avoid it, nix the prosecutions, or otherwise take any extra action. And while, yes, that does mean that they were okay with this result and felt that it simply fed into the goals of their pursuit, it still remains that it was not a target that was actively pursued at any point.
And, note that I’m not saying that team Trump wouldn’t have actively pursued this goal if they’d thought of it. I would not be surprised if they had.
But, at the same time, saying that John Wayne Gacy didn’t murder John F Kennedy isn’t a defense of John Wayne Gacy, nor should it be taken to mean that I don’t believe that Gacy is a murderer. It’s just happenstance that, factually, Gacy did not murder JFK.
As said, team Trump may well have jumped on this idea and bungled it in an even worse if they’d thought of it. This is not a defense of the administration. It is simply the happenstance that they are innocent by lack of imagination.
This has been the publicly announced policy for over a year and until a month ago there was never any doubt that Trump’s policy was to prosecute everyone who crossed the border as criminals. They’ve been real solid on that for over a year, no one has ever said anything else, neither officially, unofficially, be not by leak. For possibly the first time ever, the Trump administration has given a consistent response, whch is that this is not the policy, it’s a result of the policy.
He was asked what the result of the policy was and he answered factually.
If I say that I am going to throw you out of my house, and you reply, “But I have no money. I’m going to starve and die.”
When I answer back, “Well then, you’ll die…” That does not actually mean that I have decided to throw you out of my house in order to murder you. I may, for example, be throwing you out of my house because I can’t support you and I believe that it’s up to you to find a way to support yourself.
“Callousness” is a different word and even category of word from “objective”.
If you want to say that Sessions is completely okay with the result of his policy and is a callous asshole, then yes, that is clearly true. I am not defending him nor the policy nor the results of the policy.
As I have said, I am simply doing the same as pointing out that John Wayne Gacy did not murder JFK. A newspaper which reported that as being the case or which strongly implied that to be the case would be incorrect or dishonest, respectively. Stating that would not be an exoneration of Gacy.
And as said, it is worth pointing out when the media is being untruthful or misleading at this particular moment in time. It is dangerous for the media, in the Trump era, to demonize Trump for the things that he did not do.
The way that people work, in general, is that if they discover you lying about some subject, then they stop trusting anything you say about that subject. If the media would lie about Trump locking up kids then they may also lie about him laundering money or working with the Russians or anything else. At least as regards Trump, they are not a reliable source.
Saying that the Trump administration was incompetent and callous and it lead to a bunch of kids being locked up in cages with no idea of where their parents were or what was going to happen to them is all true, and it’s not a story that paints the White House in a positive light by any means. Reporting the truth does not somehow cause Trump and his people to come out smelling like roses.
The media writes that the policy will be a failure because these kids are coming from countries where they were at risk of being killed, raped, or forced into slavery. A deterrent has to be worse than the alternative in order to work. The next article is about how much trauma it causes suburban kids to be separated from their parents and so, clearly, these kids are going to be mentally scarred by having been caged and put into foster care. Alright…so having endured a march across the length of Latin America and growing up in a country where death, rape, and slavery were real concerns, suddenly this is the greatest horror that could ever happen?
C’mon, media, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t freely move from it’s the worst think ever to “It barely even ranks as an impediment” right back to back.
Don’t attack just to attack. Don’t accuse them of having lost 2000 children if you haven’t actually confirmed that. Don’t retcon the aims of a policy that’s been public and unchanged for almost a year and a half into something that it’s not. Your job is to be truthful and impartial.
On this one, you have not been. And while the administration deserves the hate that you’re throwing their way in the general sense, and their callousness is perfectly deserving of it as well, you end up weakening your long term ability to keep the world informed and acting reasonably by giving way to short term angst and a desire to rack in the clicks with demonizing headlines and misleading (and often dishonest) content.
This is a lot of words used to explain away concentration camps for children, but the above is so incorrect that it must be noted.
Jeff Sessions knew what he was doing. He knew the law. This is something he has wanted, and worked for, since his time in the Senate.
Seriously… in one paragraph, what is your point in writing the previous two apologia?
ISTM that the real moral horror of all this, according to the above two SR posts, is that the reporting on this issue isn’t more… how do I say this… isn’t more “fair and balanced”.
It’s not really about whether or not this particular misdemeanor should be prosecuted, it’s about what you’re willing to DO in order to prosecute them.
In order to prosecute these misdemeanors, do you take thousands of children (who are innocent of ANY crime), forcibly separate them from their parents, bring them, by themselves, to an abandoned Wal-Mart, enclose them inside a chain link pen, and put them to bed with a survival blanket and a mat? Is that a line you’re ok with crossing in response to a misdemeanor?
I don’t know how a person with a soul can be ok with treating children like that because their parents committed a petty crime.
If thousands of White, American Citizen children were housed inside detention camps because their parents drove drunk, you bet your sweet ass that we’d find an alternative way to prosecute DUI.
This isn’t that. This is you haven’t even come to my house yet and I am saying “If you come to my house I will kick you out and let you die in the snow. This policy will hopefully deter you from coming”.
One explicit goal of the policy is to deter future immigration. Kelly said, in 2017, that the policy was being considered "in order to deter more movement ".
What else could “in order to” mean?
No, you’re saying newspapers shouldn’t say Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK because he was never convicted in a court of law. You’re ignoring textual evidence that disproves what you say because it doesn’t match the deductive conclusion you reached based on your prior assumptions about how policy decisions get made. You are applying Hanlon’s razor, forgetting that it cautions against assuming malice. We aren’t *assuming *malice. We have direct evidence.
You know that Asylum seekers (who are not illegal crossers) have been separated from their children, right? And not reunited. Bet once you are processed through Canadian customs you and your daughter will be reunited not left in cage because no system was in place to track the parents.
Sage Rat, since you are refusing to comply with my request that you be specific about the subjects you are hanging your accusation on, would you please define for us the following words, as you understand them:
- the media
-liberal
-the left
Thanks in advance.
The media - Mainstream professional news media producers. E.g. the New York Times, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, MSNBC, etc.
Liberal - A person who would score in the bottom-left of the Political Compass.
The left - The group of people who would score in the bottom-left of the Political Compass.
This does seem likely to be a case of the DHS failing to follow the law, I should note. Unfortunately, it is not getting as much press attention as it should - though, possibly, that’s because they are still investigating how prevalent it has been.
Yes, the policy to prosecute border crossers as criminals was a policy instituted early last year, in order to deter people from coming into the country.
Find a cite from February/March/April of last year that the administration was actively attempting to find a legal mechanism to allow them to separate children from their families.
Find an example, from 2017, that isn’t some form of a journalist saying to them, “But this policy will lead to families being separated?” And then them confirming that as the case.
Find evidence that they are following a different procedure from the Obama administration, post-criminal prosecution.