President Donald Trump

[Bernie Brewer]

Some other quotes directly from your link:

But they are still children in cages, not gangsters, not delinquents. Just children, 900 of them, in a makeshift border-town processing center that is larger than a football field. They pass the day sitting on benches or lying side by side on tiny blue mattresses pressed up against each other on nearly every square inch of the floor in the fenced areas.

But most of the children lie motionless on side-by-side mattresses with looks of intense boredom on their faces. Inevitably, given the number of people, it smells of feet and sweat and straw, giving it the look and feel of the livestock areas at the State Fair.

Still, in 2016 the conditions of similar detention facilities were being described as “deplorable”:

Apparently it's political to find this treatment of children unacceptable. Enjoy your perch above the fray.

That was my point. It shouldn’t be political but we have people seizing an opportunity to make it political. If, like few things our elected officials do, we could not make it political and just figure it out we’d all be so much better off. As would the children involved. Who is it exactly that you think is above the fray here?

[Bernie Brewer]

One of the big things that ALL people are getting confused about is where the II's (I'm going to use that acronym for Illegal immigrants) are actually coming from. recently, Mexican's accounted for less than half of the II's entering the country.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/

I can't agree that it's a good thing that we can't find the missing children is maybe a good thing. To me it shows just how flawed the system really is.

And while the Obama admin did indeed lose 8 children that were later found working as farm labor, this seperating children from their parents is all on Trump and Sessions...they own this atrocity. Hell that publicly announced what they were gong to do, and Kelly had NO idea where they were going to put the kids. Remember "foster care or whatever"?

We'll agree to disagree on the share of blame for this one...

Yup, if you’re one of those sticking this on the right, then we’ll agree to disagree. Even Sessions saying that 100% quote was only him enforcing the law already on the books. He didn’t need to make the comment but this is saying out loud what’s already been going on for years. This is an “us” (as in we and not US as in country). We should demand it be fixed but our politicians will just fucking blame each other and not do a thing. And that’s a non-partisan assessment, which stinks for the displaced kids.

[Hornsby]

Yup, if you’re one of those sticking this on the right, then we’ll agree to disagree. Even Sessions saying that 100% quote was only him enforcing the law already on the books. He didn’t need to make the comment but this is saying out loud what’s already been going on for years. This is an “us” (as in we and not US as in country). We should demand it be fixed but our politicians will just fucking blame each other and not do a thing. And that’s a non-partisan assessment, which stinks for the displaced kids.

This article disagrees with your take:

In a speech before law-enforcement officials in Arizona on Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the federal government seeks to separate parents from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to discourage more crossings.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the policy officially went into effect last week, though hundreds of children have already been taken from their parents in recent months.

“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border,” Sessions said, in typically severe remarks.

“We are not going to let this country be invaded. We will not be stampeded. We will not capitulate to lawlessness,” he added.

Under the new system, children will be treated as if they arrived in the United States alone, The Wall Street Journal reports. If they are from a country other than Mexico or Canada, they are placed with a family member or in a shelter while their case is considered. Their parents are allowed to apply for asylum once they are apprehended, but may be detained while their applications are considered.

Sessions also announced the Justice Department’s intention to criminally prosecute every immigrant who illegally crosses the border, as opposed to simply busing them back over the border.

The extreme family-separation measure, which had been reported to be under consideration in March, marks a dramatic shift from current policy, in which authorities generally try to keep detained families together by sending them to the same detention facilities.

The new rule does not apply to families who present themselves to authorities at the border and apply for asylum.

Crossings between the U.S. and Mexico have surged in recent months, an uptick that prompted President Trump to send the National Guard to the border, though arrests remain at historic lows.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/trump-administration-to-separate-parents-children-at-border.html

[Bernie Brewer]

This article disagrees with your take:



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...at-border.html

“The new rule does not apply to families who present themselves to authorities at the border and apply for asylum.” Hmmm.

Again, we’ll agree to disagree on these minor differences and where blame lies. Trump and Sessions are very deserving but Obama and his Admin isn’t in the clear but your mileage obviously varys from mine.

I’ll say again, what ought to be the focus, instead of the faux morale outrage for political purposes and high ground gain, is fixing the problem and permanently resolving it. I guess I'm expecting too much by thinking we grown ups can solve the problem instead of wasting time placing blame.

[DMT]

That was my point. It shouldn’t be political but we have people seizing an opportunity to make it political. If, like few things our elected officials do, we could not make it political and just figure it out we’d all be so much better off. As would the children involved. Who is it exactly that you think is above the fray here?

I was responding to JJ. I am certainly not defending Obama because his record on immigration was pretty terrible. But, again, the current folks in charge seem to deliberately amping up the cruelty as a disincentive tactic.

[Bernie Brewer]

I was responding to JJ. I am certainly not defending Obama because his record on immigration was pretty terrible. But, again, the current folks in charge seem to deliberately amping up the cruelty as a disincentive tactic.

I knew that. I was agreeing with you but adding my own flare. As I just wrote to Horns, this issue is terrible, no one can or should dispute that. And, it needs responsible adults to fix it. But, our elected officials are more invested in the blame game. Who’s to blame or who’s to blame more is a stupid exercise that resolves nothing. The current Administration now has the responsibility to fix it or they’ll have blood on their hands. Session’s recent change to this hard line approach is wrong headed.

And now that I reread my post I see why you might have thought I was attacking you, possibly. I wasn’t. Just asking a poorly worded question at the end. I see no one gaining the high ground but again that’s just me. Whether several stories are conflated into one or not, this is, as teenwolf said, sickening.

[Hornsby]

“The new rule does not apply to families who present themselves to authorities at the border and apply for asylum.” Hmmm.

Again, we’ll agree to disagree on these minor differences and where blame lies. Trump and Sessions are very deserving but Obama and his Admin isn’t in the clear but your mileage obviously varys from mine.

I’ll say again, what ought to be the focus, instead of the faux morale outrage for political purposes and high ground gain, is fixing the problem and permanently resolving it. I guess I'm expecting too much by thinking we grown ups can solve the problem instead of wasting time placing blame.

I can't claim to have "faux outrage" over this, I have real outrage over the treatment that this country, and in particular this administration, is inflicting on human beings. Yes, we DO need to fix it ASAP, and part of fixing the problem, IMO, is to put enough pressure on them that they have no choice but to change this horrendous policy.

Even Trump calls this a "horrible law", but of course, he blames the Democrats for what's happening. Rinse, rather, then repeat...and so it goes.

[B-Fly]

The President and I agree on something today! We both wish he hadn't picked Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. Sure, we wish it for very different reasons, but I'll take alignment with the President where I can find it.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/politics/donald-trump-jeff-sessions-attorney-general/index.html

[The Feral Slasher]

I was responding to JJ. I am certainly not defending Obama because his record on immigration was pretty terrible. But, again, the current folks in charge seem to deliberately amping up the cruelty as a disincentive tactic.

Saw a link to the article below and it reminded me of your comment as well as others in this thread.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/trump-obama-child-deportations-ice-immigration

This is pattern we should all be familiar with by now: Trump takes an already extreme Obama-era policy and makes it worse; liberals who were silent under Obama attack Trump for this policy; Trump strikes back by garbling the truth while making a legitimate but entirely hypocritical point; and liberals cite Trump’s self-serving and factually inaccurate criticism to absolve their side of any sins.

Why does this matter? It’s not, as Favreau suggested to one critic, about “own[ing] a lib.” It’s about the continued refusal by liberals and professional Democrats to reckon with the fact that their favorite president ran the kind of administration they would have been disgusted with had he simply had a different letter in front of his name.

People — mostly immigrant rights groups — spent years shouting into the wind that Obama’s deportation machine was as terrible as it was dangerous. They were roundly ignored, at least until the president needed to win an election. In fact, according to a recent report by the Migration Policy Institute, one of the reasons Trump has failed to deport people at the same clip as Obama is due to the marked increase in local resistance to ICE, resistance that for a variety of reasons was not as forthcoming under a charismatic, tolerant, Democratic president.

[OaklandA's]

As that article states, during the Obama administration, the vast majority of parents who were deported had been convicted of a crime. That is one key difference between the Obama era and the Trump era.

[The Feral Slasher]

As that article states, during the Obama administration, the vast majority of parents who were deported had been convicted of a crime. That is one key difference between the Obama era and the Trump era.

So in the quoted text below are they referring only to families with convicted parents ? Or do some or all of these items refer to some that were not convicted of any crime ?

Let’s be clear: Favreau is right that Obama never established a policy that specifically mandated that kids be separated from parents at the US-Mexico border. This a new, Trump-era innovation in cruelty.

But Obama’s defenders overstate the degree to which this is a departure from norms. Here is a brief list of things the Obama administration did do:

• Arrested tens of thousands of undocumented parents whose kids were US citizens, causing them to lose contact with their children.
• “Disappeared” those parents in the immigration enforcement system, where they were nigh-on impossible to track down, before deporting them to countries they hadn’t lived in for as long as decades.
• Orphaned thousands of kids who were left without a legal guardian when their parents were shunted to another country.
• Sent the parents of those kids to places where there was more than a good chance they’d be kidnapped, tortured, sexually assaulted, killed, or sometimes all of the above.
• Traumatized both the kids left behind and the kids whose parents were undocumented but not yet arrested, which saw those kids develop symptoms of PTSD, stress-based health problems, and night terrors.

In other words, Obama may have never specifically called for migrants to have their kids taken away when crossing the border, but wrenching parents away from their kids — in many cases, permanently — was for many years a regular, known outcome of his policies.

This isn’t even to mention the Alien Transfer and Exit Program (ATEP), began in 2008, but which saw an increase in use under Obama. ATEP was a less extreme precursor to Trump’s current policy, with the same goal: to make crossing the border such an awful, disorienting ordeal that migrants would never try to do so again.

[senorsheep]

So in the quoted text below are they referring only to families with convicted parents ? Or do some or all of these items refer to some that were not convicted of any crime ?

The Washington Post (June 2013): ICE Director John Morton stepping down

During Morton’s tenure, ICE logged a record number of deportations, with the total increasing by more than 7 percent during his first three years on the job. A memo Morton issued in 2010 instructed officers to focus on felons and repeat lawbreakers instead of immigrants in the country illegally in general.

...

“John Morton is the bogeyman in the immigrant community,” said Kica Matos, director of immigration rights with the Center for Community Change. “Immigrant rights advocates are expressing a collective sigh of relief over his resignation.”

Department of Homeland Security data show that 45 percent of all people deported from the United States in 2012 had no criminal records, according to America’s Voice Education Fund, a group that advocates for immigration reform.

“What we have are broken families, devastated communities and people who are afraid of any kind of law enforcement,” Matos said.

The Morton memo is interesting in that it prioritizes deportation targets not for any stated humanitarian reason, but simply because ICE was facing a triage situation:

In addition to our important criminal investigative responsibilities, ICE is charged with enforcing the nation's civil immigration laws. This is a critical mission and one with direct significance for our national security, public safety, and the integrity of our border and immigration controls. ICE, however, only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal alien population in the United States. In light of the large number of administrative violations the agency is charged with addressing and the limited enforcement resources the agency has available, ICE must prioritize the use of its enforcement personnel, detention space, and removal resources to ensure that the removals the agency does conduct promote the agency' s highest enforcement priorities, namely national security, public safety, and border security.

To that end, the following shall constitute ICE's civil enforcement priorities, with the first being the highest priority and the second and third constituting equal, but lower, priorities.

Priority l. Aliens who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety.
Priority 2. Recent illegal entrants.
Priority 3. Aliens who are fugitives or otherwise obstruct immigration controls.

Here's a link to the full Morton memo, for any interested parties: Full Morton memo

Edit to add: So, I think the answer to your question is, while the administration can claim that they were targeting mainly criminals at the policy level, that doesn't appear to be what was happening on the ground, as many immigration rights advocates have asserted.

[OaklandA's]

So in the quoted text below are they referring only to families with convicted parents ? Or do some or all of these items refer to some that were not convicted of any crime ?

The article says that in 2013, 72,000 people were deported who had U.S.-born children, and 62,000 of them had criminal convictions. It's not clear why the remaining 10,000 were deported, but some may have returned from a previous deportation.

I'm not saying that this is good or bad, just that many people are OK with deporting those with criminal convictions, and that's a big component of the Obama deportations. Of course, that still does affect their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

[The Feral Slasher]

The article says that in 2013, 72,000 people were deported who had U.S.-born children, and 62,000 of them had criminal convictions. It's not clear why the remaining 10,000 were deported, but some may have returned from a previous deportation.

I'm not saying that this is good or bad, just that many people are OK with deporting those with criminal convictions, and that's a big component of the Obama deportations. Of course, that still does affect their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens.

So what about the other 10,000 ? you'd think the same people who are criticizing Trump now would have been concerned about the situation back in 2013. Which was the point of the article, but whatever. I don't plan to spend any more time discussing.

[OaklandA's]

So what about the other 10,000 ?

Like I said, we don't know the details of each case. Homeland Security sometimes deports people because they claim they are a threat to national security, or gang-affiliated, or many other reasons even without a criminal conviction. I'm sure there were some deportation mistakes made during the Obama administration. But I think there is a clear difference - the Obama administration emphasized deportation of convicted criminals, and at least 85% of those fit that description. Under Trump, the current policy is to intentionally break up families as a deterrent.