The grotesque sadism of Lindsey Graham
by digby
If you want to know if Trump’s rank racism and xenophobia are now the central organizing principles of the GOP watch Lindsey Graham. He had been in danger of a primary challenge because he’d been seen as a “maverick” in the mode of John McCain and in the age of Trump that means you are a traitor to your king. He’s been working overtime to ensure that nobody thinks he’s anything but one of Trump’s most eager, boot-licking henchmen.
Here’s his latest gesture toward full-on racist sadism:
Sen. Lindsey Graham is introducing a new bill that he says will help stop the flow of immigrants from Central America and “regain control of our border.” Graham claimed that current caps in law have led to the escalation of immigrants traveling to the border as well as those in government custody
“We have a perfect storm brewing at the border because of a series of broken and outdated laws related to asylum and children,” said Graham. “No matter how high the wall will be built…no matter how many agents you put at the border, they’ll keep coming because they want to get caught.”
Graham’s bill would reverse a long-standing order on detention dubbed the “20-day rule.” The rule, adopted after the 1997 Supreme Court Flores agreement, which set the nation’s rules for the treatment of immigrant minors in federal custody, says that migrant children, whether they arrived with family or are unaccompanied, cannot be held in detention for more than 20 days. Graham’s bill would instead recommend holding migrant children with their families for 100 days.
“We need more time and more bed space. The best way to stop that flow is to send them back to their country as you would with Canada or Mexico,” he explained.
Graham told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” last week that his bill would help discourage adults from bringing children to the border as a legal “shield” and address the cache of asylum claims clogging up the U.S. court system.
“We’re gonna go to 100 days, we can hold minor children for 100 days so we can actually process the entire family without letting them go. We’re gonna increase judges by 500; we got almost 900,000 backlog of asylum claims. We’re gonna wipe out the backlog [of asylum claims.]”
In addition, Graham’s bill would prohibit asylum claims at the U.S. border and force migrants to apply for asylum in an American consulate in their home country, change existing laws to have minors be sent back to their home country when brought over with family, and hire 500 new immigration judges to help clear the asylum backlog.
“The incentive that is created by our laws will cease to exist,” Graham said. “This humanitarian disaster will begin to repair itself.” Graham told reporters that he’s willing to sit down with Democrats in order to address the “underlying problem in Central America” and merry any Democratic proposals to his bill.
It’s a move the Trump administration has long been pushing for ever since adopting its “zero tolerance” policy along the southern border.
That policy, which led border officials to separate migrant children from their parents as families sought asylum in the U.S., faced a flood of criticism over the treatment of young immigrants. Detention centers quickly filled up, and images of children being kept behind metal fences caused a public outcry. In the initial weeks of the zero-tolerance policy rollout, around 2,000 children, including babies, were separated from their families.
It will “repair itself” at the expense of unkonwn thousands of desperate families and their babies and kids, you cruel bastard.
I think it’s the sanctimony that gets me about Graham — the insistence that he’s a moral actor doing the right thing when he’s a vicious malevolent snake without any moral conscience at all.
And by the way, 500 judges is not nearly enough to process all those claims and he knows it. He’s just putting lipstick on his pig to pretend that he’s doing something bipartisan.
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