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Month: June 2018

Where’s Ivanka?

Published by digby on June 19, 2018

Where’s Ivanka?

by digby

People keep wondering why the allegedly empathetic first daughter, senior white house adviser and mother of three hasn’t had anything to say about children being ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border.

Well, she has been in California but she was too busy to visit the border area where they are imprisoning the kids:

President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump was greeted by protesters in Fresno, California, on Monday as she arrived for a Republican fundraising event.

The Fresno Bee reported that one protester held two signs: One said ‘Trump is Nixon,” the other said “Trump-Nunes: It’s Mueller Time.”

The second sign refers to Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), a Fresno-area lawmaker who is reportedly one of the reasons the first daughter has chosen to make the trip for the fundraiser.

“I don’t think it’s really a surprise, particularly for Nunes, given that he’s been so loyal to the president,” Michael Evans, chairman of the Fresno County Democratic Party, told The Hill of her visit. “I think they would be viewing this as some sort of payback, but it does raise the question are they concerned about Devin Nunes election prospects this year.”

She’s rewarding Nunes for his “loyalty” to the president. (Most people would call him an accomplice but that’s another post.)

Ivanka is completely useless as a “moderating” force in the White HOuse. It’s obvious that she agrees with him.

I hope she enjoys spending the rest of her life hanging around Trump voters in places like Fresno because she is going to be shunned everywhere else.

I won’t use that other word, but I will call her a feckless con artist. She is.

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Trump’s top racist troll in full effect

Published by digby on June 19, 2018

Trump’s top racist troll in full effect

by digby

McKay Coppins at the Atlantic wrote a long profile of Trump’s odious major domo, Stephen Miller a while back. He offers an update in light of Miller’s interview with the New York Times over the week-end:

First, it should be understood that Miller’s hardline approach to immigration predates his work for Trump. In 2013, as an aide to then-Senator Jeff Sessions, Miller made his name on Capitol Hill fighting ferociously against a bipartisan immigration-reform bill alongside populist-right media allies like Breitbart News. The effort to sink the legislation prevailed, and his credentials as a true-believing ideologue were secure. He is, by all accounts, an avowed restrictionist, and he likely believes that separating children from their parents at the border will deter future illegal immigration.

But when we talked, Miller also made it clear to me that he sees immigration as a winning political issue for his boss.

“The American people were warned—let me [be] sarcastic when I remark on that—[they] were quote-unquote warned by Hillary Clinton that if they elected Donald Trump, he would enforce an extremely tough immigration policy, crack down on illegal immigration, deport people who were here illegally, improve our vetting and screening, and all these other things,” Miller told me. “And many people replied to that by voting for Donald Trump.”

Skeptics will note that most Americans did not, in fact, vote for Donald Trump, and that polls continue to show widespread disapproval of some of his signature immigration positions. But it doesn’t matter. In Miller’s view of the electoral landscape, the president is winning anytime the country is focused on immigration—polls and bad headlines be damned. (This explains why Miller is, according to Politico, leading an effort within the administration to plan additional crackdowns on immigrants in the months leading up to the midterm elections.)

Speaking to The New York Times, Miller framed his theory this way: “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border. And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border. And not by a little bit. Not 55–45. 60–40. 70–30. 80–20. I’m talking 90–10 on that.”

Of course, if the goal were simply to draw voters’ attention to the border, there are plenty of ways to do it that are less controversial (not to mention, less cruel) than ripping young children from the arms of asylum seekers and sticking them in dystopian-looking detention centers. But for Miller, the public outrage and anger elicited by policies like forced family separation are a feature, not a bug.

A seasoned conservative troll, Miller told me during our interview that he has often found value in generating what he calls “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” This belief traces back to the snowflake-melting and lib-triggering of his youth. As a conservative teen growing up in Santa Monica, he wrote op-eds comparing his liberal classmates to terrorists and musing that Osama bin Laden would fit in at his high school. In college, he coordinated an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” These efforts were not calibrated for persuasion; they were designed to agitate. And now that he’s in the White House, he is deploying similar tactics.

Take the travel ban, for example. During Trump’s first week in office, Miller worked with Steve Bannon to craft an executive order banning travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim countries. Trump signed the order on a Friday afternoon, unleashing chaos at airports across the country, complete with mass protests, wall-to-wall media coverage, and a slew of legal challenges. Afterward, Bannon reportedly boasted that they had enacted the measure on a weekend “so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.”

As public backlash has intensified in recent days against the new border policy, Trump administration officials have predictably struggled to formulate a coherent, unified defense. Amid all the bumbling recriminations and shifting talking points, one can sense in some of these officials a natural response to the situation developing at the border—if not shame, then at least chagrin.

But for Miller, it seems, all is going according to plan—another “constructive controversy” unfolding with great potential for enlightenment. His bet appears to be that voters will witness this showdown between Trump and his angry antagonists, and ultimately side with the president. It’s a theory that will be put to the test in November. In the meantime, the heartrending orchestra on the border will play on.

Trump takes another step

Published by digby on June 19, 2018

Trump takes another step

by digby

“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. — Donald Trump, May 2018

Tyranny, oppression, moral degeneration, persecution and mass killing have always and everywhere started with the pollution of the language, making it sound clean and decent where it should have been base and violent (‘the new order’, ‘final solution’, ‘temporary measures’, ‘limited restrictions’) or else with making the language sound coarse and bestial where it should have been humane and delicate (‘parasites’, insects’, ‘germs’, etc.) I said the writer ought to be a smoke detector, if not a fire brigade, within his or her own language because wherever a human being is referred to as a parasite or a germ, there follow, sooner or later, death squads and exterminations.

Wherever war is called peace, where oppression and persecution are referred to a security, and assassination is called liberation, the defilement of the language precedes and prepares the defilement of life and dignity. In the end, the state, the regime, the class, or the idea remain intact where human life is shattered. Integrity prevails over fields of scatter bodies.   — Amos Oz, 1985

h/t to @helengravesnyc on twitter

This immigration horror isn’t just Trump. It’s a conservative movement strategy.

Published by digby on June 19, 2018

This immigration horror isn’t just Trump. It’s a conservative movement strategy.

by digby

My Salon column this morning:

On Monday, in a courtroom in Wichita, a federal judge told Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach that he had so blatantly violated federal discovery rules in a case he argued, defending a law requiring voters to prove their citizenship, that she ordered Kobach — a former Department of Justice official under George W. Bush — to take remedial legal courses. She also ruled against the law itself, saying there was no evidence it was necessary.

Kobach is best known for writing the “show me your papers” law in Arizona that was also struck down in federal court. He also headed up the ill-fated Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was disbanded after many states balked at Kobach’s demand that they turn over their confidential voter rolls to the federal government. He had very big plans:

Kobach is currently running for governor of Kansas, and the crusade to curtail immigration and voting rights will continue no matter how his checkered political career turns out. This is now a central organizing principle of the Republican party.

Donald Trump’s administration has the most extreme immigration policy in a century. Among his first acts as president was his theatrical Muslim ban. He’s beefed up the border patrol and ICE and told them all to “take off the gloves.” He put one of the most anti-immigration politicians in the country in charge of the Justice Department, and they are systematically deporting people, even those who have been here for 50 years. Trump backed out of a deal to legalize the DACA recipients at the last minute. Now they are separating children from their parents at the border and putting them into detention camps in order to “deter” Latino immigrants, even those who are seeking asylum from the rampant violence in their home countries.

It’s tempting to chalk all this up to simple Republican racism and nativism. That is certainly what fuels the emotion on this issue on the right. Conservative media pounds the message that “the illegals” are all on welfare (which isn’t true) and are ruining the culture with taco trucks on every corner. (If only.) But that isn’t the whole story.

Back in 2014, when the wave of unaccompanied minors from Central American came to the border, Laura Ingraham led the charge against those kids:

Oh no, you won’t. This is our country. . . . Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No, you won’t.

She ranted day after day about these children, claiming that the government was “trafficking illegal immigrants from one part of the country to another part of the country to further erode American wages and further forward their goal of ultimate amnesty and changing the electoral and cultural landscape of the United States forever.”

Note that Ingraham said “electoral” landscape. We can see that Trump and his lieutenants see this latest border crisis as an opportunity to get their base fired up and get out to the polls in November. But movement conservatives have a long-term strategy in mind that goes way beyond the midterms and even Trump. That’s why cynical politicians and media stars have been pushing this issue so hard for the last few years.

They realized somewhere along the line that the fundamental xenophobia of the GOP base would make it very difficult to form any sort of governing majority that included Latinos, the fastest growing ethnic group in the country. So they decided their future prospects would be better served by suppressing the Latino vote with spurious accusations of voter fraud and demagoguery about foreigners more generally, in an effort to force the government to curb immigration overall. Anti-immigrant groups like VDARE have made the argument explicit, saying Democrats favor immigration because it will give them an electoral advantage.

Back in August of 2015, Rush Limbaugh endorsed Trump’s hardcore immigration position, saying that “everybody knows that [bipartisan immigration reform] is an immigration plan that is going to result in millions more registered Democrats.” He even got a shout-out from the big guy himself that same day:

Limbaugh is a bit cagier these days, saying that he’d support DACA recipients getting a path to citizenship as long as they aren’t given the vote for 12 to 15 years.

Right-wing radio host Dennis Prager made a similar case this year in a piece laying out three reasons the left supports immigration. The first of these:

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, chain migration, sanctuary cities, and citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally will give the Left political power. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Latin American immigrants will vote Democratic. So with enough new voters from Latin America alone, the Democrats would essentially be assured the presidency and Congress for decades.

(If you’re wondering: Reason two is because they are Marxists and reason three is that they want to feel good about themselves.)

The ruling right-wing diva of anti-immigrant fervor is of course Ann Coulter. She has been ranting even more than usual these days, telling Breitbart that nobody should believe the “actor children” at the border, citing some articles from 2011 about refugees embellishing their stories to get asylum. Coulter’s influence on the GOP on this issue can’t be overstated — her book “Adios America” was clearly a major influence on Trump’s agenda.

You may recall that Coulter called Trump’s most notorious immigration speech during the campaign “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” It was later revealed that she and Stephen Miller had written it. There are no limits to how low she will go in demeaning and degrading immigrants, but she too has stated clearly what the real issue is. At CPAC in 2014, she put it this way:

Amnesty goes through, and the Democrats have 30 million new voters. I just don’t think Republicans have an obligation to forgive law-breaking just because the Democrats need another 30 million voters.

The nativism we are seeing play out right now is cruel and inhumane. It’s born of an ugly strain of white nationalism that forms the core of the Republican Party under Trump. But the conservative movement is still working feverishly on their own projects, using Trump and his demagoguery to serve their long-term goals. They know that keeping Latinos from voting and shutting down immigration, both legal and illegal, is necessary to their political survival as a movement and a party.

This time they may have underestimated how the rest of America feels about seeing small children ripped away from their families for cheap political purposes. Let’s hope so, anyway.

The Black Gate is closed by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on June 19, 2018

The Black Gate is closed
by Tom Sullivan

People don’t vote their interests. They vote their identities. That conclusion was a key takeaway from inhaling George Lakoff‘s “Moral Politics” one weekend. Now America faces an identity crisis.

The outrage and opprobrium directed at the Trump administration this week is not about its policy of separating small children from their families at the border. It is about what that policy (and his others) says about us as a people that our government would use anguish as a weapon against innocent children. Not unseen half a world away either, but on our doorstep.

The Trump-spawned identity crisis is about whether we are the people we think we are or something darker and crueler. Americans, most anyway, do not like what they see of themselves reflected in the images, sounds and stories from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Richard Cohen wonders in a Washington Post op-ed whether the images from the border have already lost the midterm elections for Republicans and cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. The viral image John Moore (Getty Images) captured of a crying 2-year-old girl at the southern border has defined the cruel, dark heart of Trumpism, damaging his already tarnished brand the way the photo did of President George W. Bush peering out the window of Air Force One at the Hurricane Katrina devastation. The indellible 1972 image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, burned and naked, fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam, defined the toll the Vietnam War was taking on civilians. Is this who we are? Moore’s image again raises that question.

President Donald Trump, senior advisor Stephen Miller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have no plan for reuniting the families their “zero tolerance” policy has torn asunder. Their goal is to send a message to would-be immigrants that they are unwelcome here. The Black Gate is closed.

Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker follows Emily Kephart of the immigrant-rights group Kids in Need of Defense as she hunted for a six-year-old Guatemalan girl separated from her father at the border.

“No protocols have been put in place for keeping track of parents and children concurrently, for keeping parents and children in contact with each other while they are separated, or for eventually reuniting them,” he writes. Immigration lawyers, public defenders, and immigrant advocates have tried to do the job in their place.

Kephart tracked the girl from U.S. facility to her family’s village following clues:

Erik Hanshew, a federal public defender in El Paso, told me that the problems begin at the moment of arrest. “Our client gets arrested with his or her child out in the field. Sometimes they go together at the initial processing, sometimes they get separated right then and there for separate processing,” he said. “When we ask the Border Patrol agents at detention hearings a few days after physical arrest about the information they’ve obtained in their investigation, they tell us that the only thing they know is that the person arrested was with a kid. They don’t seem to know gender, age, or name.”

Jennifer Podkul, who is the policy director of Kids in Need of Defense, told me that advocates are trying to piece together information about the whereabouts of children based on the federal charging documents used in the parent’s immigration case. “You can try to figure out where and when the child was apprehended based on that,” she said. “But where the child is being held often has nothing to do with where she and her parent were arrested. The kids get moved around to different facilities.”

“I have a master’s degree, and I’m fluent in English,” Kephart says. And resolving a single case can take her days.

No protocols are in place for keeping track of which child goes with which detainee or where they end up or for reuniting families because once Trump & Co. have separated parent from child, it’s “Deterrence Accomplished.” No need to worry about a few dead-enders.

What America is witnessing in the human tragedy occurring on the southern border is this is what Trump’s base wanted. This is their identity. It is what they voted for. The Trump administration will not go to the mat to build a country defined by e pluribus unum, one that lifts Liberty’s lamp beside a metaphorical golden door flung wide. But it will to placate this guy:

Trump will deliver for the White House propaganda arm:

Josh Marshall tweets, “It’s basically the kind of racialist dehumanizing you hear before mass atrocities are committed. “They look innocent. But if they grow up they could slit your throat in the night.”

Your classic “Nits make lice” justification. Is this who we are?

Finally, this from AFP:

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, think how flattered Vladimir Putin must be right now. Maybe enough to let Donald build that Moscow hotel.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Published by digby on June 19, 2018

“The right way”

by digby

Recall that when Trump took office he called Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte and told him that he thought he was handling the opiod crisis “the right way.”

Duterte’s moving into a new phase:

President Rodrigo Duterte, whose war on drugs and crime in the Philippines has killed thousands, is reportedly considering a new tactic in his fight: Arming the public.

Duterte wants to distribute guns to “42,000 community leaders, known as “barangay captains,” after consulting with the police and intelligence agency,” as the New York Post reports.

The guns would be free for anyone not involved in illegal drugs; privately purchased handguns would be subsidized. “Duterte has repeatedly said thousands of community officials were involved in the trade, without elaborating.”

From The Post:

Activists and Duterte’s political opponents say the campaign is overwhelmingly targeting users and small-time peddlers in poor communities and accuse police of systematically executing suspects, often based on weak intelligence.
The authorities reject that and say all those killed were drug dealers who put up violent resistance and left police with no choice but to shoot them.Those in favor of Duterte’s plan includes the association of barangay officials. Its president, Edmund Abesamis, told CNN Philippines he believes this “will ease the reluctance of most village chiefs to disclose information on drug suspects — since the captains become targets of the criminal.”

Among its opponents are activist groups that say the government’s aim is to incite terror among the public. A spokeswoman for Rise Up for Life and for Rights said as much, arguing that communities faced more than their share of “tyrannical and fascist attacks” during Duterte’s drug war.

Trump wouldn’t have to distribute guns. He could just deputize his pals in the NRA. Don’t think he wouldn’t like to do it.

At the moment Trump is agreeing to make some lame “just say no” ads so that he can say he told all the people who are dependent on opiods that their president told them not to do it so they can’t say they didn’t know. You can bet that after a while he’s going to bring the hammer down. Sessions is chomping at the bit to do it “the right way.”

This crisis at the border is a test of what Trump can get away with against the will of the majority of this country. If he does, it won’t end there.

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“They’re not being gassed” so it’s all good

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

“They’re not being gassed” so it’s all good

by digby


Michael Tomasky caught Fox and Friends over the week-end as they were talking about the crisis t the border:

President Donald Trump’s favorite cable-news program has wasted no time going to bat for the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents.

Over Father’s Day weekend, the hosts of Fox & Friends—the Fox News flagship morning show—took turns defending Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy, describing the family separations as an uncomfortable but necessary way to deter illegal immigration.

“Criminals are separated from their kids every day in the United States of America,” co-host Steve Doocy declared Monday morning.

“We do have sympathy for those parents—who wouldn’t? You don’t want a parent to be separated from their child,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said. “But you’re right: If they make the choice to do it, there will be consequences.”

On both Fox & Friends and its weekend counterpart, the hosts reserved more outrage for how the media and critics describe the policy than for the cruel separation policy itself.

During one Monday morning segment, co-host Brian Kilmeade argued that Democrats and conservative opponents of the child-separation policy—including former First Lady Laura Bush—have been overdramatic in comparing the detention centers to prison camps like the ones the U.S. government forced Japanese-Americans into during World War II.

“A lot of Democrats are using this as an opportunity to grandstand,” Kilmeade said after claiming liberals were “blowing the whole thing out of proportion to act like the president is anti-children.”

Other hosts got pedantic, deflecting from the policy itself by admonishing reporters for using too harsh a descriptor to diagnose what goes on at the detention camps.

Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth, for example, slammed former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for calling the detention facilities “concentration camps.” The detention facilities, Hegseth argued, are actually a welcome change for the immigrant children.

“One man’s concentration camp, according to Michael Steele, is another man’s shelter,” Hegseth said Saturday morning. “These kids are going in, they’re being taken care of by our government, are being fed, clothed, provided for, helped to contact their parents, to be reunited.”

That same morning, co-host Abby Huntsman did suggest the separation policy was “not sustainable,” but, like her colleague, immediately pivoted to bashing the media for its coverage of the facilities. “They’re not in cages, they’re not being gassed,” she said of the immigrant children.

First they are traumatized by living in a country over run by violence, then a long trek of thousands of miles to try to get asylum and now being forcibly separate from their parents and held in detention centers where they don’t know anyone and have no idea what’s going on.

But they aren’t being gassed so it’s fine.

Also, other immigrants have done bad things so these kids have to be punished. Or something:

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Meanwhile, in Bizarro World, Dear Leader reaches for the stars

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

Meanwhile, in Bizarro World, Dear Leader reaches for the stars

by digby

If only that was just a dream. But it isn’t. It’s a waking nightmare.

By the way, he’s cancelling the military exercises in the south pacific because they are too expensive.

Also, he still wants his massive military parade.

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A living nightmare: the voices of crying babies and little kids being taken from their parents

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

A living nightmare: the voices of crying babies and little kidsbeing taken from their parents

by digby

Oh my god. This is so awful. These people re telling these little babies that hthey will be able to talk to someone from their consulate as they scream and cry for their mothers and fathers.

The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. “Well, we have an orchestra here,” he jokes. “What’s missing is a conductor.”

Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says she’s memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. “My mommy says that I’ll go with my aunt,” she whimpers, “and that she’ll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible.”

An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities.

[…]

In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists.

The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who “heard the children’s weeping and crying, and was devastated by it.”

The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable.

The case of Oscar Millan shows ICE’s renewed focus on strict immigration enforcement. Under the Obama administration, agents had discretion in cases of immigrants with gravely sick children.
The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girl’s aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call.

“It was the hardest moment in my life,” she said. “Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She’s crying and begging me to go get her. She says, ‘I promise I’ll behave, but please get me out of here. I’m all alone.’”

The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: “They’re on the buses. They’re in the banks. They’re in schools. They’re in the police. There’s nowhere for normal people to feel safe.”

She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost.

The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her niece’s situation would put hers and her daughter’s asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said she’s managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another.

The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her.

“I know she’s not an American citizen,” the aunt said of her niece. “But she’s a human being. She’s a child. How can they treat her this way?”

I just don’t know what to say. I’m overwhelmed.

You Republicans who back these monsters are monsters yourselves. How can you sleep???

Oh, and by the way, here’s your Dear Leader today:

A county without borders is not a country at all. People coming into the country are bringing “death and destruction. They are thieves and murderers and so much else,”

You mjust feel so much safer knowing those crying children aren’t threatening you anymore.

But then he always said he’d go after the families.

By the way, the audience in that disgusting white house applauded his statement.

Q poll: 55% of Republicans support Trump’s family separation policy

Published by digby on June 18, 2018

Q poll: 55% of Republicans support Trump’s family separation policy

by digby

Just don’t call it deplorable. That would be very rude.

American voters oppose 66 – 27 percent the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released today.

Republican voters support the separation policy 55 – 35 percent, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support it, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe- ack) University National Poll finds.

American voters also support 79 – 15 percent allowing immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, so-called “Dreamers,” to remain and ultimately to apply for citizenship.

All listed groups support Dreamers, ranging from 61 – 28 percent among Republicans to 94 – 5 percent among Democrats.

Support for Dreamers has ranged from 77 percent to 81 percent in every Quinnipiac University National Poll conducted this year.

American voters oppose 58 – 39 percent building a wall along the border with Mexico. The only listed groups to support the wall are Republicans 77 – 17 percent and white voters with no college degree 52 – 44 percent.

The Trump Administration has been too aggressive in deporting illegal immigrants, 50 percent of voters say, as 13 percent say the administration has not been aggressive enough and 33 percent say the administration has been acting appropriately.

I wonder what their limits are? I think we’re seeing that when it comes to people they just viscerally hate for no reason, they don’t have any. That’s a lot of people. Everyone who isn’t exactly like them.

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