Lancia
January 9, 2019, 1:21am
1
Trump will give a speech tonight from the Oval Office, the first of his presidency. He’s expected to make his case for his border wall. Considering he’s been talking about little else for several months, I’m curious what, if anything, he’ll have to say that hasn’t been said / tweeted a zillion times already.
This thread is for following the speech, fact-checking, pointing & laughing, and general discussion. T-minus 40 minutes to showtime.
Lancia
January 9, 2019, 1:23am
2
Here’s a link to a live stream of the speech courtesy of the Washington Post.
For those that want to get an early start on their “fact checking”, or are just interested in some background information, President Trump sent this to Congress a few days ago.
The most pressing legal changes are as follows:
Terminate the Flores Settlement Agreement—which is preventing families from being held together through removal; and
Amend the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA), to allow for the safe and humane return of illegally-smuggled minors back to their families in their home countries.
Trump Poppycock as the goal is to justify the detention of families for an undefined amount of time.
Getting rid of Flores means indefinite family detention
It’s not at all clear that Trump can, legally, issue an executive order that would override the Flores settlement. That’s why analysts are assuming that any order Trump issues to keep families together in DHS custody will be challenged by a lawsuit and may get thwarted.
If DHS somehow manages to craft an executive order that evades that issue, or if Congress passes any of the suite of Republican bills that purport to end family separation by expanding family detention, it will mean one of two things.
Either the Trump administration will start keeping families in detention for as long as it takes to fully adjudicate their asylum cases — which can take months or years — or it will need to ram them through an “expedited” legal process to minimize their time in detention.
President Obama tried the latter in 2014. It went horrifically. Pro bono lawyers who went to family detention facilities (which were flung together in a matter of weeks) reported that it was all but impossible for families to get due process for their asylum claims.
The former is what families are still going through at the Pennsylvania facility. The long-term detention of immigrant children raises some of the same concerns that keeping them in custody without their parents does, in terms of long-term trauma. Bright lights in the Burks facility reportedly keep children from sleeping well, for example — and they can be disciplined if they try to climb into a parent’s bed for comfort.
Furthermore, getting rid of the Flores settlement entirely wouldn’t just get rid of the mandate to release children; it would also get rid of the requirements for what conditions children must be held in. In other words, the legal standards that undergird the Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities — standards that Trump administration officials brag are among the highest in the world — would be wiped away.
Depending on what replaced Flores, it’s possible that ICE could simply use existing adult detention facilities to herd children into as well.
The Trump administration could hold itself to higher standards. But for that matter, it could also find an alternative to detaining immigrant families that still allowed the government to ensure they showed up in court. It does not appear inclined to do so.
I won’t watch, I’ll just wait till he’s done and the adult rebuttal begins.
In FY2017 and FY2018, ICE officers arrested approximately 235,000 aliens on various criminal charges or convictions within the interior of the United States—including roughly 100,000 for assault, 30,000 for sex crimes, and 4,000 for homicides.
What do you guys think? Fact or not a fact?
You seriously think it’s even worth a fact check?
What are the comparable stats for American citizens in the same time period?
As is also usual for Trump, it is half a fact with the intent to mislead.
The numbers don't lie.
Another study, published in March in the journal Criminology, looked at population-level crime rates: Do places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants have higher rates of crime? The answer, as the chart above shows, is a resounding no.
States with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through 2014. “Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence,” authors Michael T. Light and Ty Miller found.
That’s just a simple correlation, of course, and it’s well documented that many factors beyond immigration can affect the crime rate. So Light and Miller ran a number of statistical analyses to more clearly isolate the effects of illegal immigration from those other factors. Among other things, they find that the relationship between high levels of illegal immigration and low levels of crime persists even after controlling for various economic and demographic factors such as age, urbanization, labor market conditions and incarceration rates.
All told, Light and Miller sliced the data 57 ways to see whether there was anything they missed, but not one of their analyses showed any positive relationship between illegal immigration and crime. They concluded that not only does illegal immigration not increase crime, but it may actually contribute to the drop in overall crime rates observed in the United States in recent decades.
bobot
January 9, 2019, 2:11am
14
Wow, immigrants sure sound like bloodthirsty lunatics!
bobot
January 9, 2019, 2:12am
16
At least he didn’t declare a National Thing or whatever it’s called. There’s that.
The NY Times is fact checking while the speech is going on:
Here’s what the president said, and how it stacks up against the facts.
“Every week 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which flows across our southern border.”
This needs context.
Most heroin smuggled into the United States does come through the southwest border, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s latest National Drug Assessment report.
But most fentanyl enters the United States from packages mailed directly from China through traditional ports of entry, according to the report, and through Canada from China. A lower potency, lower-cost grade of fentanyl is also smuggled across the southwest border from Mexico. The fentanyl directly from China is far more lucrative for sellers because of its higher purity. The fentanyl sent through conventional mail packages are proven difficult for law enforcement to detect. Fentanyl coming from Mexico is often hidden in automobile compartments, much like conventional drug smuggling.
The president’s opioids commission reported last November noted, “We are losing this fight predominately through China.”
Lancia
January 9, 2019, 2:14am
18
Yeah. This whole thing was nothing more than a slightly more coherent version of his recent tweets.
Has he forgotten that we have him on tape saying “I’ll own the shutdown?”
Well, crap. I was expecting him to show a giant check from Mexico to pay for the wall.