Trump's Massive Purge of Undocumented Immigrants Is Back On

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse.]

Last month, Donald Trump announced a massive purge of "millions" of undocumented immigrants, then reversed course at the last minute, demanding that House Democrats fund his vile immigration agenda or he would proceed with the sweep.

A week later, Speaker Nancy Pelosi caved on her demands that any emergency border funding include protections for migrant children and limitations on the use of the funding, and allowed the Senate border bill to come up for a vote in the House, where it passed, giving Trump a $4.6 billion check to spend on his nativist malice, with zero restrictions.

And in exchange for that capitulation, Trump has now announced that the purge is back on, anyway.

Caitlin Dickerson and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at the New York Times report:

Nationwide raids to arrest thousands of members of undocumented families have been scheduled to begin Sunday, according to two current and one former homeland security officials, moving forward with a rapidly changing operation, the final details of which remain in flux. The operation, backed by [Donald] Trump, had been postponed, partly because of resistance among officials at his own immigration agency.

The raids, which will be conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over multiple days, will include "collateral" deportations, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the preliminary stage of the operation. In those deportations, the authorities might detain immigrants who happened to be on the scene, even though they were not targets of the raids.

...Agents have expressed apprehensions about arresting babies and young children, officials have said. The agents have also noted that the operation might have limited success because word has already spread among immigrant communities about how to avoid arrest — namely, by refusing to open the door when an agent approaches one's home. ICE agents are not legally allowed to forcibly enter a home.

This is happening in the United States of America right now: Donald Trump is ordering a purge and the agents tasked with carrying out that order are expressing qualms about arresting babies.

Undocumented immigrants must know their rights, and ICE agents who are apprehensive about the operation must acknowledge their responsibility to resist inhumane orders. STAND DOWN. Don't carry out these raids.

And Democrats must learn to never, ever, negotiate with Trump. They gave him $4.6 billion in exchange for absolutely nothing, except more betrayal and more malice.

You know what to do: MAKE NOISE. RESIST.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Migrant Children Allege Sexual Abuse and Retaliation

[Content Note: Sexual assault; harassment and abuse.]

Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley at NBC News report:

The poor treatment of migrant children at the hands of U.S. border agents in recent months extends beyond Texas to include allegations of sexual assault and retaliation for protests, according to dozens of accounts by children held in Arizona collected by government case managers and obtained by NBC News.

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy held in Yuma, Arizona, said he and others in his cell complained about the taste of the water and food they were given. The Customs and Border Protection agents took the mats out of their cell in retaliation, forcing them to sleep on hard concrete.

A 15-year-old girl from Honduras described a large, bearded officer putting his hands inside her bra, pulling down her underwear, and groping her as part of what was meant to be a routine pat down in front of other immigrants and officers.

The girl said "she felt embarrassed as the officer was speaking in English to other officers and laughing" during the entire process, according to a report of her account.

A 17-year-old boy from Honduras said officers would scold detained children when they would get close to a window, and would sometimes call them "puto," an offensive term in Spanish, while they were giving orders.

...All children who gave accounts to case managers had been held at the border station longer than the 72 hours permitted by law.

There is much more at the link.

This is not the first time that we have heard reports of migrant and refugee children in detention being sexually assaulted.

In February, Florida Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch disclosed Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) documents during a House hearing on the Trump Regime's "zero tolerance" policy that revealed HHS had "received more than 4,500 complaints of sexual abuse against unaccompanied minors from 2014-2018."

Last July, Rebekah Entralgo and Joshua Eaton at ThinkProgress reported that "a man with a history of serious sex crimes allegations" had been hired as the human resources manager for a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant children in Topeka, Kansas.

Last June, Aura Bogado, Patrick Michels, Vanessa Swales, and Edgar Walters at Reveal News reported that unaccompanied immigrant children were being sent to shelters with known abuse histories, including staff that had sexually abused minors and allowed older children to sexually abuse younger ones.

Children are being tortured by the U.S. government, in its citizens' names, and the U.S. government is justifying that endemic abuse with the utterly fabricated pretense that it's necessary to protect us.

Even if every reprehensible lie Donald Trump tells about the sinister threat posed by undocumented immigrants and asylum-seekers were true, and even if his vile nativist policies were actually effective, the cost would not be worth it to me.

I would take my chances with Trump's conjured monsters before I would support actual monsters being paid with my tax dollars sexually abusing children. The choice isn't even close.

But the fact is that the crisis at the southern border (and in detention facilities across the country) is one largely of Trump's invention. He didn't create the reasons for the mass migration toward the U.S., although he is exacerbating it by refusing to address climate change and threatening to withdraw critical support to Central America. But he did create the horrendous situation in concentration camps by fundamentally altering U.S. policy to require detentions, rather than letting people go with a court date in hand.

A change he justifies by asserting that immigrants don't show up for those court dates, which is a straight-up lie.

One of many lies he tells: There is no urgent crisis threatening the United States because of undocumented immigration — not an employment crisis, not a crime and violence crisis, not a health crisis. The opioid crisis is not attributable to migrant workers or asylum-seeking refugees. Terrorists are not entering the country over the southern border.

The administration's rationale for their obscene immigration policy continually shifts, but every new explanation is just as dishonest as the one before it.

This entire crisis has been build on a foundation of lies. And children are being tortured for those lies. Which is not a bug, but a feature. Because malice is the agenda.

This is intolerable. You know what to do: MAKE SOME NOISE.

Resist.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

We Resist: Day 900

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

* * *

Earlier today by me: The USWNT Is F#@king Awesome and Primarily Speaking and A Couple of Notes on the Epstein Charges.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse. Covers entire section.]

This is a reminder that Mike Pence is: 1. As profligate a liar as Donald Trump; 2. As heinous a nativist wreck as Donald Trump, who, while governor of Indiana, went to court in order to try to legally deny access to social services to Syrian refugees resettling in the state. https://t.co/nLsQdmEVIW

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 8, 2019

Mike Pence is going to go to the southern border and tell rank lies about what he sees there. Let us all endeavor to counterbalance his propaganda with the truth, wherever we can.

Elham Khatami at ThinkProgress: United Nations Human Rights Commissioner 'Appalled' by Conditions in U.S. Detention Centers. "Conditions in U.S. detention centers where migrants and refugees are being held are 'undignified' and 'alarming,' said United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet on Monday. ...Bachelet said she was appalled by the detrimental effects of such conditions, especially for children, adding that 'Detaining a child even for short periods under good conditions can have a serious impact on their health and development — consider the damage being done every day by allowing this alarming situation to continue.'"

Amanda Holpuch at the Guardian: Migrant Children Held in Texas Facility Need Access to Doctors, Says Attorney.

Hundreds of children at a migrant detention center in Texas are being held in "inhumane" conditions that amount to an "emergency public health crisis" and should be allowed immediate access to doctors, according to an attorney who gained rare access to the facility.

Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School's immigrant rights clinic, was one of six attorneys to visit the detention center in Clint as part of ongoing litigation about an agreement that states unaccompanied children can't be held in U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities for more than 72 hours.

The team found that children had no adequate access to medical care, had no basic sanitation, were exposed to extreme cold, and did not have adequate access to drinking water or food.

"I've been visiting children detained in federal immigration custody for 12 years," Mukherjee told the Guardian. "I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen, smelled, had to bear witness to such degrading and inhumane conditions."

Sob.

[CN: Homophobia] And of course it isn't just the children who are being subjected to degrading and inhumane conditions.

Customs and Border Patrol agents at a migrant processing center in Texas allegedly attempted to humiliate a Honduran migrant by making him hold a sign that read, "I like men," according to emails written by an agent who witnessed the incident. https://t.co/NSgsInu7pz

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 5, 2019

Molly O'Toole and Carolyn Cole at the LA Times: Facing Trump's Asylum Limits, Refugees from as Far as Africa Languish in a Mexican Camp.

A group of roughly 100 Haitians, Africans, and South Americans cross the Rio Grande, just shallow enough for adults to wade despite an overnight storm.

As they wait on the muddy bank near Del Rio, Texas, to surrender themselves to the Border Patrol, the voices of children in the group carry across the river to the Mexican side.

There, in the city of Ciudad Acuña, hundreds of migrants have formed an impromptu refugee camp in an ecological park bound on one side by the river. Just outside the park, the official port of entry to the United States sits at the end of a short bridge.

They've crossed thousands of miles by foot, boat, and bus to seek asylum in the U.S., only to find themselves stalled in a purgatory of soggy tents and overflowing bathrooms. Now, they face an uncertain wait prolonged by Trump administration policy.

The temptation to make the risky and illegal river crossing mounts daily.

"If you see people jumping over the river, it is because they are tired of staying here," said one resident of the camp, Luis, who declined to give his last name out of fear for the safety of his family back home.

Home for him would be the West African nation of Cameroon, where Luis was vice principal of a school until he fled last fall. He escaped a widening conflict between the country's English-speaking minority and its Francophone-majority government, which receives security assistance from the U.S.

He was jailed and tortured before escaping to neighboring Nigeria, Luis said. After a trek across three continents, he landed here, where he has waited for six weeks to present himself to U.S. officials at the Del Rio port of entry.

He hopes to join a sister in Ohio.

"At times, it is really disheartening," he said, "so it is difficult to wait."

Patrick Timmons at the Guardian: 'People with No Names': The Drowned Migrants Buried in Pauper's Graves. "Dotted amid the decorated graves there is the sudden, jarring sight of plain, wooden crosses. One has scrawled on it in Spanish: '24 April 2019. Unidentified male recovered from the Rio Bravo approximately 300 meters from the black bridge in the Morelos neighborhood.' ...As drownings have increased in the treacherous river amid the Trump administration trying to block all undocumented people from crossing into the U.S., even to seek asylum, Piedras Negras has had to bury unidentifiable bodies after they were hauled out of the water by first responders."

Family members of a 47-year-old man who died after falling from the border fence said he was trying to return to his family in the United States after being deported and "had lived in Arizona and California since he was 2." https://t.co/G7LcjeRnQe

— Nick Miroff (@NickMiroff) July 5, 2019

Malice is the motherfucking agenda.

As I have noted many times previously: This administration (mis)treats migrants and refugees as the canary in the coalmine of their official cruelty. The Trump Regime's war on immigrants is intolerable on its face, but understand that, whatever they are doing to undocumented immigrants, they will do to other marginalized people and dissidents in the same way eventually.

With that as preface, Drew Harwell at the Washington Post: FBI, ICE Find State Driver's License Photos Are a Gold Mine for Facial-Recognition Searches. "Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver's license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans' photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show. Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents, and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by researchers with Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure."

A lot of folks will read headlines about this item, see "ICE," and assume the technology is only being used to "nab illegals." It isn't. It's already being used against citizens. And, even if it were only being used against undocumented immigrants, that's bad enough. But the population's indifference to abuses against undocumented immigrants will mean this surveillance programs expands without much pushback. So, let's make some noise.

Tina Vasquez at Rewire.News: Sanctuary Leaders Fight Back Against ICE's 'Psychological Violence' and Steep Fines. "Ivan and his mother Hilda Ramirez came to the United States fleeing familial violence in 2014. Since then, they have been 'under attack' by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the elder Ramirez said. They were detained together for almost a year after first arriving in the United States. Since their release from detention, they have been targeted for deportation. Because of ups and downs in their immigration cases, they have been forced to take sanctuary twice in St. Andrews Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. On July 4, soon after receiving a letter from ICE informing her of a $303,620 fine, Ramirez told Rewire.News she sees these financial penalties as part of a larger pattern of attacks against immigrants in sanctuary."

Matt Zapotosky at the Washington Post: Justice Department Changing Lawyers on Census Case. "The Justice Department is swapping out the lawyers who had been representing the administration in its legal battle to put a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census, possibly signaling career attorneys' legal or ethical concerns over the maneuvering ordered by [Donald] Trump." We knew this wasn't over yet. Goddammit.

* * *

Jamie Ross at the Daily Beast: Federal Grand Jury Probing Top GOP Donor Elliott Broidy over Trump Inauguration. "Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally Elliott Broidy is under investigation by a federal grand jury over suspicions that he used his position as vice chairman of Trump's inaugural committee to help him strike business deals with foreign leaders." Yeah, that Elliott Broidy.

Mohamad Bazzi at the Guardian: The Troubling Overlap Between Jared Kushner's Business Interests and U.S. Foreign Policy. "The meeting in May 2017 was crucial because it helped solidify a Trump foreign policy favoring Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their conflict with Qatar, a tiny emirate in the Gulf that is rich in natural gas and home to a major U.S. military base. It also raises questions about a problem that has dogged Kushner since the earliest days of the Trump administration: whether his family's business interests are driving his political decisions." Yes, they are.

Spencer Kimball at CNBC: Deutsche Bank Will Exit Global Equities Business and Slash 18,000 Jobs in Sweeping Overhaul. "Deutsche Bank announced Sunday that it will pull out of global equities sales and trading, scale back investment banking and slash thousands of jobs as part of a sweeping restructuring plan to improve profitability. ...Deutsche has come under renewed scrutiny in the U.S. over its business relationship with [Donald] Trump. The House Intelligence and Financial Services Committees subpoenaed Deutsche in April for records on Trump's finances. Trump and his family sought to have that subpoena squashed in court, but a federal judge ruled the bank can turn over financial documents to House Democrats."

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Malice Is the Agenda — and Here's What It Looks Like

[Content Note: Nativism; concentration camps.]

U.S. Border Patrol has insisted that the appalling conditions in which migrants and refugees are detained at the southern border "are necessary to stem the flow" of people seeking refuge in the United States. The Trump Regime asserts that their nativist malice is a "deterrent," which is abject dishonesty.

Desperate people are fleeing violence, climate change, unemployment, and/or hunger. Parents bringing their children on the terrifying, perilous journey to the U.S. are trying to save their children's lives. And their own. That Trump wants them to fucking die can't be a deterrent when death lies at the other end of their journey, too. Making torture and death possible outcomes of seeking asylum won't end asylum-seeking — it will just make it less safe.

The sadistic architects of the Trump Regime's immigration policy want it both ways: They claim they are harming migrants and refugees as an allegedly effective deterrent, while simultaneously asserting that they can't help but torture people in concentration camps because their numbers are overwhelming the U.S.'s resources.

So, not an effective deterrent then. But we aren't meant to scrutinize the inherent contradiction in their bullshit justifications for their institutional abuse, nor are we meant to talk about how the detentions are unnecessary, as people could (and should be) released with a notice to return for a later court date, nor are we meant to talk about anything else that exposes the Trump Regime's deadly cruelty for the rank fascism that it is.

But let's talk about it, anyway. Let's talk about it with anyone and everyone who will listen, because our silence will be deadly for increasing numbers of people detained in these hells.

Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General released its final report on overcrowding at several border facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, and it included in the report photographs that reveal the extent of the horror.

This is but one of the images. There are more. Some of them show people lying in cages or rooms packed in so tightly that there is no room to walk. Others show people stuffed into tiny rooms at double the capacity, so that none of them can sit or lie down. They are all forced to stand, packed in like sardines.

At BuzzFeed, Hamed Aleaziz notes of the above photo that "inspectors indicated that 82 men were held in a cell with a maximum capacity of 41."

This is horrific.

You know what to do: MAKE NOISE. Make it any way you can. Just don't be silent. Please.

RESIST.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

We Resist: Day 894

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

* * *

Late yesterday and earlier today by me: Quote of the Day and Congressional Delegation Finds Appalling Conditions at Border; Another Death After Detention by ICE and Primarily Speaking.

Here are some more things in the news today...

There's a breaking story that is very weird, and I'm not exactly sure what to make of it, but here's what we know as of publication time: Mike Pence was abruptly called back to the White House as he was about to depart for an event in New Hampshire, and administration officials insisted it's not because either Donald Trump or Pence is having any kind of health issue.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has reportedly canceled his plans for today to meet urgently with his defense minister. But administration officials also insist that nothing to do with why Pence was called back to the White House. Just a coincidence.

But.

This is also breaking news: "Fire erupts on one of the Russian navy's deep-sea submersibles, killing 14 sailors, Russian Defense Ministry says."

Now, when I read "fire erupts on one of the Russian navy's deep-sea submersibles," all I can think of is this piece I wrote in March: Russia Threatens to Arm Submarine with Nuclear Doomsday Devices — the second part of which was about Russian ships allegedly lurking near underwater internet cables, with the presumed intent to interfere with them in some way.

The sub in question is "a Russian AS-12, the smallest nuclear sub in the world and also one of the deepest diving." According to Russia's defense ministry, the sub was "studying the bottom of the world ocean" when the fire broke out.

If that sounds neither honest nor reassuring to you, you are certainly not alone.

Anyway. Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's something. I'm just putting this here now because I have a suspicion that it will make more sense, and be a useful reference, in the future.

* * *

Andy Sullivan and Makini Brice at Reuters: Trump Plans Tanks and Flyovers at Fourth of July Celebration in Washington.

Donald Trump said on Monday that he plans to display battle tanks on Washington's National Mall as part of a pumped-up Fourth of July celebration that will also feature flyovers by fighter jets and other displays of military prowess.

The military hardware is just one new element in a U.S. Independence Day pageant that will depart significantly from the nonpartisan, broadly patriotic programs that typically draw hundreds of thousands of people to the monuments in downtown Washington.

...Also on the agenda are an extended fireworks display and flyovers by Air Force One, the custom Boeing 747 used by U.S. presidents, and the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels jet squadron.

"I'm going to say a few words, and we're going to have planes going overhead," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. "And we're going to have tanks stationed outside."

And that's not all, naturally. [Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] Samuel Osborne at the Independent: Trump 'Demands U.S. Military Chiefs Stand Next to Him' at 4th of July Parade. "Mr. Trump has asked the chiefs for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines stand next to him as aircraft from each of their branches of the military fly overhead, the New York Times reports. The event is likely to raise concerns over Mr. Trump's desire to parade U.S. military forces through the streets of the capital in a similar manner to authoritarian regimes such as North Korea, Iran, and China."

Editors of the Washington Post: Trump's Fourth of July Plans Just Keep Getting Worse. "Equally, if not more troubling, is his insistence on a display of military might that will include a flyover of warplanes and the stationing of tanks or other armored military vehicles on the streets of the capital. What this will cost the Defense Department and the National Parks Service is anyone's guess. (Officials have refused comment.) But the question of expense pales in comparison with the message that will be sent by a gaudy display of military hardware that is more in keeping with a banana republic than the world's oldest democracy."

[CN: White supremacy; misogyny] Will Sommer at the Daily Beast: Proud Boys and Allies to Rally in D.C. to Capitalize on 'Trumpstravaganza'. "Members of the far-right Proud Boys men's group and their allies will rally in D.C. on July 6, just a week after violence at rival Portland rallies ratcheted up tensions between groups on both the right and left. ...The Proud Boys — self-described 'Western chauvinists' who adhere to a dizzying array of rules, including restrictions on how much they can masturbate — will be joined by a number of right-wing internet personalities at the 'Rally for Free Speech' at D.C.'s Freedom Plaza. The event's website lists a number of right-wing internet provocateurs, including conservative smear-pusher Jacob Wohl, anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer, British far-right activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec."

Fucking hell.

* * *

Jamie Ross at the Daily Beast: Trump Administration 'Misses Deadline' to Print Census Forms. "The Trump administration has missed its own July 1 deadline to print the paper forms needed for next year's Census, NPR reports. A website tracking the progress of 2020 Census materials shows they're yet to be officially approved by the White House's Office of Management and Budget, which is headed by Trump's acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney."

They are, as Danielle McLean rightly notes at ThinkProgress, deliberately slow-walking the printing.

This, after Trump threatened last week to delay the census if he's not allowed to include his nativist citizenship question. As I noted at the time: This is almost certainly a test ahead of the 2020 election. If Trump is allowed to "delay" or suspend the census without consequence, there is nothing that will stop him from "delaying" or suspending the election, which he already constantly suggests is being "rigged."

[CN: Nativism]

"AG William Barr has moved forward with a regulation changing the way immigration courts handle appeals, expanding the ability of those courts and the attorney general himself to issue decisions that bind the way all immigration judges must decide cases." https://t.co/IBZsWllum7

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 2, 2019

So not only does Trump have nativist allies running all three arms of immigration, but he's got the entire Justice Department being run by a narivist ally, too. JFC.

[CN: Nativism; child abuse. Video may autoplay at link.] Chantal da Silva at Newsweek: Lawyers Who Visited Detained Migrant Children Say Border Officials Barred Them from Seeing the Sickest Kids, Who Were Held Separately.

In an interview with Newsweek, Human Rights Watch U.S. Program Executive Director Nicole Austin-Hillery said U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency personnel refused to grant her and other lawyers visiting the Clint detention center last month access to a "sick ward" where sick children were being detained.

"We asked if we could visit with children who were sick and who had been ill for a few days because our understanding was that there was an area of the facility called the 'sick area' or the 'sick ward' and so, we said we wanted to see those children," Austin-Hillery said. "We wanted to see how those children, who are most vulnerable right now, how they are being treated and being cared for."

However, despite repeated requests, Austin-Hillery said CBP officials refused to grant lawyers access, claiming it was for their own health and safety.

"We were prohibited from seeing those children and we were told it was for our own safety," Austin-Hillery said.

"We told them, 'We don't care. We're not concerned about catching a cold,'" she said.

Ultimately, however, the lawyers were forced to leave the facility without being able to see the children who would be among the most vulnerable at the detention center.

[CN: Nativism] Staff at Reuters: Asylum Seekers Returned to Uncertainty, Danger in Mexico. "The United States government should cease returning asylum seekers to wait in Mexico during their U.S. immigration court proceedings, Human Rights Watch and the Hope Border Institute said in a report released today. Human Rights Watch's 50-page report, ''We Can't Help You Here': U.S. Returns of Asylum Seekers to Mexico,' finds that thousands of asylum seekers from Central America and elsewhere, including more than 4,780 children, are facing potentially dangerous and unlivable conditions after U.S. authorities return them to Mexico."

"Trump said Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is going to be increasing deportations of undocumented immigrants after Independence Day." https://t.co/74GYTBwkO2

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) July 2, 2019

[CN: Nativism; abuse] Rebekah Entralgo at ThinkProgress: Homeland Security Admits It's Using Abhorrent Conditions at Detention Centers to Deter Migration. "Poor conditions including overcrowding, flu outbreaks, and a lack of clean clothes are just par for the course at an El Paso border station, according to a report released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Office of Inspector General. In the report, border patrol argues that these conditions are necessary to stem the flow of migrants to the United States."

Malice is the agenda.

* * *

Tucker Carlson asked Trump why American cities are filthy and have people urinating on the streets. Trump said, "It's a phenomena that started two years ago." (?)

The whole answer is something. pic.twitter.com/tGgsg538A7

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 2, 2019

Philip Bump at the Washington Post: Trump Is Incapable of Accepting That Most Americans Don't Like Him. Yeah, well, I've got news for him: Most of the rest of the fucking planet doesn't like him, either.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Congressional Delegation Finds Appalling Conditions at Border; Another Death After Detention by ICE

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse; death.]

Yesterday, a Congressional delegation that included Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Joaquin Castro (presidential candidate Julián's twin brother), traveled to Texas to visit two CBP facilities. Although they were told they were not allowed to bring in cameras, Castro managed to sneak one in, and then reported back on Twitter what they saw.

Our border patrol system is broken. And part of the reason it stays broken is because it's kept secret. The American people must see what is being carried out in their name. The Hispanic Caucus led a delegation of members of Congress to visit 2 border patrol facilities.

Here's what we found:

At the El Paso Border Patrol Station #1, women from Cuba, some grandmothers, crammed into a prison-like cell with one toilet, but no running water to drink from or wash their hands with. Concrete floors, cinder-block walls, steel toilets.

Many said they had not bathed for 15 days. Some had been separated from children, some had been held for more than 50 days. Several complained they had not received their medications, including one for epilepsy. Members of Congress comforted them when the women broke down.

They asked us to take down their names and let everyone know they need help. They also feared retribution. We then went to the Clint Border Patrol Station that warehouses children and some parents.

The tents outside, used during the surge recently, were dark and surrounded by chain link fences. The showers — mobile units — were dank, dirty, and only too small in number for the hundreds of people there just a few weeks ago.

And a boy, perhaps three years old, pressed his face against the dirty glass of a locked steel door. He smiled big and tried to talk to us through the thick glass. His family — or another — ate Ramen on the floor a few feet away.

There are many good agents — men and women working earnestly to care for the people in their custody. But they are overwhelmed in a system that is morally bankrupt and challenged by rogue agents whose culture was on full display in the Facebook group revealed by ProPublica today.

The showers at Clint Border Patrol Station. [video at link]

This moment captures what it's like for women in CBP custody to share a cramped cell — some held for 50 days — for them to be denied showers for up to 15 days and life-saving medication. For some, it also means being separated from their children. This is El Paso Border Station #1. [video at link]

All Americans must help to change this system. Thank you to the members who attended today: @RepEscobar, @RepJudyChu, @RepPeteAguilar, @NormaJTorres, @RepSylviaGarcia, @AOC, @RepLoriTrahan, @RepJoeKennedy, @RepVeasey, @RepPressley, @RepDean, @RepRashida, @gregstantonaz. pic.twitter.com/CZX0wBwWZZ

— Joaquin Castro (@JoaquinCastrotx) July 1, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez also tweeted about what she saw, including this chilling observation: "Officers were keeping women in cells with no water and had told them to drink out of the toilets. This was them on their GOOD behavior in front of members of Congress."

My representative, Rep. Madeleine Dean, tweeted after leaving the facility: "The conditions are far worse than we ever could have imagined. 15 women in their 50s-60s sleeping in a small concrete cell, no running water. Weeks without showers. All of them separated from their families. This is a human rights crisis."

And Rep. Joe Kennedy tweeted about how difficult it was for the Congressional delegation even to get as much information as they did: "CBP was very resistant to Congressional oversight. They tried to restrict what we saw, take our phones, block photos and video. Atmosphere was contentious and uncooperative."

Nevertheless, overhead Reuters photos of the McAllen Station taken in May show the extent of the horror at CBP's concentration camps:

America has no idea what’s happening at its borders. These pics made me shudder in my own skin. Now I can understand why @AOC referred to them as concentration camps.

This is not who we are as a nation! America is better than that, greater than that! #ClosetheCamps pic.twitter.com/2AjVnR3syz

— Dr.Debbie Almontaser (@DebbiAlmontaser) July 2, 2019

It is no wonder that people detained in the camps are becoming ill, and, in some cases, even dying.

At BuzzFeed, Hamed Aleaziz reports on a 30-year-old Honduran man who died in federal immigration custody:

The death of Yimi Alexis Balderramos-Torres, first reported by BuzzFeed News on Monday morning, is the sixth in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since October. Hours after the report, congressional staffers were informed by ICE officials of the man's death. Six hours after the initial BuzzFeed News report, ICE officials confirmed the death in a press release.

Balderramos-Torres had previously been apprehended by immigration officials in El Paso, Texas, on May 17, according to a statement released by ICE. The man was accompanied by his son when he was encountered by Border Patrol on May 17, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

Balderramos-Torres had been sent back to Mexico under a Trump administration program that requires Central American immigrants to wait outside the U.S. as their asylum cases make their way through the immigration courts. More than 15,000 individuals have been sent back to Mexico through the program, according to statistics released by the Mexican government. Last week, a group of asylum officers urged a federal appeals court to block the program, calling it "contrary to the moral fabric of our nation."

On May 27, Balderramos-Torres again crossed the border without authorization and was picked up by local police in the U.S. during a traffic stop. He was placed in ICE custody June 6, according to the authorities. Because he had previously been arrested by Border Patrol and deported in 2013, ICE officials "reinstated" his previous deportation order and kept him in custody pending his future removal to Honduras, they said.

Nearly two weeks later, on June 18, he was transferred to the Houston Contract Detention Facility in Houston.

On June 30, Balderramos-Torres was found "unresponsive," and medical officials at the facility were unable to revive him. He was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead Sunday morning. A cause of death is pending as officials conduct an autopsy.

Note that ICE did not notify Congress, as required by law, or the public about Balderramos-Torres' death until BuzzFeed reported it. We have no idea how many deaths have actually happened in their custody, because we cannot trust that they are reporting them unless obliged by the press to do so.

You know what to do: MAKE LOTS OF NOISE. If you are in the U.S., contact your senators and reps. If you are outside the U.S., contact your government and ask them to put pressure on the Trump administration to close the camps and abide by international law governing refugees. Write letters to the editor. Share this piece and/or others on social media. Talk to anyone who will listen about what's happening. RESIST.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Pelosi Caves; Trump Gets $4.6B Border Package

[Content Note: Nativism; abuse.]

So, late yesterday, under pressure from moderates in her caucus, Speaker Nancy Pelosi caved on her demands that protections for migrant children and restrictions on the Trump Regime's use of emergency border funding and allowed the Senate border bill to come up for a vote in the House. It passed.

In other words, Donald Trump just got a $4.6 billion check to spend on his nativist malice, with zero restrictions, while he's torturing children in concentration camps.

This is a massive failure. Progressives in the Democratic caucus are deeply unhappy about it, as well they should be. Moderates in the Democratic caucus should be ashamed of themselves, but aren't — because they believe they need to look tough on border security be reelected.

Honestly, when you're voting to fund the abuse of children knowing that malice is Trump's agenda, I don't know what difference there is between you and a Republican, anyway.

I'm so filthy fucking angry.

As I noted on Twitter yesterday: Trump is now going to say, forever, that whatever he does to children at the border has bipartisan approval.

And anyone who is still saying at this point that Pelosi is a great strategist who's just giving Trump enough rope with which to hang himself has to understand that they are implicitly making an argument that children's lives are negotiable.

What is the line in the sand? What is it?

Remember when I said the other day to keep your eyes peeled for people who claim to and ostensibly oppose Trump but their actions actually work to protect and empower him? https://t.co/xxMBrT1LT5

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 27, 2019

Bloop. https://t.co/XihOHQK0kB

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 27, 2019

Pelosi should be launching impeachment hearings of Trump for his vicious nativism at the southern border. Instead, she's giving him what might as well be a blank check to escalate it.

I cannot believe I am saying this, but Pelosi must be removed and replaced immediately.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Trump Reverses Course on Immigrant Purge — to Blame Democrats for His Malice

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

After announcing a massive sweep of undocumented immigrants last Monday, scheduled to begin yesterday, Donald Trump reversed course at the last minute, tweeting: "At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!"

[CN: Video may autoplay] According to a CNN source, Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trump late Saturday asking him to call off the raids. They reportedly "spoke at 7:20 p.m. ET Friday night for about 12 minutes, according to the source." Now Trump is using Democrats' plaintive calls for decency to blame them for his malice.

The president is an extortionist and a terrorist. https://t.co/E79rUM5QWg

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 22, 2019

Trump is demanding that House Democrats put their stamp on the cruel immigration policies Trump wants, or he'll be forced to torture undocumented immigrant families. This is sick beyond measure.

Meanwhile, following Friday's report about the Trump Regime's horrific abuse of immigrant children in their concentration camps, there have been additional first-hand accounts published about the horrors taking place in these facilities:

Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker: Inside a Texas Building Where the Government Is Holding Immigrant Children. "We drove around afterward, and we discovered that there was a giant warehouse that they had put on the site. And it appears that that one warehouse has allegedly increased their capacity by an additional five hundred kids. When we talked to Border Patrol agents later that week, they confirmed that is the alleged expansion, and when we talked to children, one of the children described as many as three hundred children being in that room, in that warehouse, basically, at one point when he first arrived. There were no windows."

William Brangham at PBS: A Firsthand Report of 'Inhumane Conditions' at a Migrant Children's Detention Facility.

Basically, what we saw are dirty children who are malnourished, who are being severely neglected. They are being kept in inhumane conditions. They are essentially being warehoused, as many as 300 children in a cell, with almost no adult supervision.

We have children caring for other young children. For example, we saw a little boy in diapers — or he had no diapers on. He should have had a diaper on. He was 2 years old. And when I was asked why he didn't have diapers on, I was told he didn't need it.

He immediately urinated. And he was in the care of another child. Children cannot take care of children, and yet that's how they are trying to run this facility. The children are hardly being fed anything nutritious, and they are being medically neglected.

We're seeing a flu outbreak, and we're also seeing a lice infestation. It is — we have children sleeping on the floor. It's the worst conditions I have ever witnessed in several years of doing these inspections.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Serena Marshall, Lana Zak, and Jennifer Metz at ABC News: Doctor Compares Conditions for Unaccompanied Children at Immigrant Holding Centers to 'Torture Facilities'. "'The conditions within which they are held could be compared to torture facilities,' the physician, Dolly Lucio Sevier, wrote in a medical declaration obtained exclusively by ABC News. ...She described conditions for [children] at the McAllen facility as including 'extreme cold temperatures, lights on 24 hours a day, no adequate access to medical care, basic sanitation, water, or adequate food.' All the children who were seen showed evidence of trauma, Lucio Sevier reported, and the teens spoke of having no access to hand washing during their entire time in custody. She compared it to being 'tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease.'"

Asked about these reports over the weekend, Mike Pence pretended like he cares (as if the Trump Regime doesn't have control over these conditions) and made sure to introduce the regime's new talking point blaming the Democrats: "If Democrats in Congress will simply step up...we can solve the crisis."

Reminder that when Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, he went to court in order to try to legally deny access to social services to Syrian refugees resettling in the state. Do not believe for one second that he's not fully supportive of Trump's vile nativist malice. https://t.co/biuevmi6HX

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) June 23, 2019

He is a despicable scoundrel. The Trump Regime could, at any time, reverse their vile nativist policy of separating and detaining families. They could certainly reverse their policies on climate change, which is driving much of the northward migration of refugees, and they could certainly reverse their decision to eliminate foreign aid for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, whence come many of the refugees fleeing violence and/or joblessness and/or hunger.

This is hardly the fault of Democrats. Mike Pence knows that. So does Donald Trump.

It wasn't the Democrats who established concentration camps in order to torture thousands of migrant and refugee children.

On that note, I will end by recommending this blunt and necessary editorial at the Salt Lake Tribune by their editorial board: Yes, We Do Have Concentration Camps.

MAKE YOUR CALLS. Resist.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Migrant Children Being Kept in Appalling Conditions

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

The Trump Regime is abusing children. And with every new report we get about the conditions in which migrant children are being detained, it becomes more urgent that we raise relentless hell about the state-sanctioned torture of children being done under the auspices of "protecting" us.

The AP reports:

A legal team that recently interviewed over 60 children at a Border Patrol station in Texas says a traumatic and dangerous situation is unfolding for some 250 infants, children and teens locked up for up to 27 days without adequate food, water and sanitation.

A team of attorneys who recently visited the facility near El Paso told The Associated Press that three girls, ages 10 to 15, said they had been taking turns keeping watch over a sick 2-year-old boy because there was no one else to look after him.

When the lawyers saw the 2-year-old boy, he wasn't wearing a diaper and had wet his pants, and his shirt was smeared in mucus. They said at least 15 children at the facility had the flu, and some were kept in medical quarantine. Children told lawyers that they were fed uncooked frozen food or rice and had gone weeks without bathing or a clean change of clothes at the facility in Clint, in the desert scrubland some 25 miles southeast of El Paso.

"In my 22 years of doing visits with children in detention I have never heard of this level of inhumanity," said Holly Cooper, an attorney who represents detained youth. "Seeing our country at this crucible moment where we have forsaken children and failed to see them as human is hopefully a wake up for this country to move toward change."

The Flores settlement stipulates that children can be held by Border Patrol for no more than 72 hours before being transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services, but "many children interviewed by the lawyers said they were kept inside the facility near El Paso beyond 72 hours."

The Trump Regime justifies this violation of the law by saying that Border Patrol is overwhelmed, but they could simply stop separating and detaining families. Instead: "The Trump administration has been scrambling to find new space to hold immigrants as it faces withering criticism from Democrats that it's violating the human rights of migrant children by keeping so many of them detained."

Just yesterday, Dallas/Fort Worth reporter Jason Whitely reported: "Feds are opening a new camp in Texas for unaccompanied minors who are crossing the U.S./Mexico border. This one, just outside Carrizo Springs, Texas, will house more than 1,000 captured children."

Captured children.

The government cannot provide proper care to the children already in its custody, and they want to add 1,000 more. Because the neglect, the cruelty, the malice is the agenda. Harm is the objective.

MAKE YOUR CALLS. Resist.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Today in Trump's Vile Nativist Agenda

[Content Note: Nativism; child abuse.]

The Trump Regime is explicitly abusing children, and justifying it by claiming it's a strategy to try to deter migrants and refugees.

A former ICE official spoke to Hamed Aleaziz at Buzzfeed about an upcoming purge, saying: "They have begun utilizing every apparatus available to them to target, separate, and terrify small children in order to claim a 'win' on immigration."

The operation will "target and remove undocumented immigrant families who have received final orders of removal in an attempt to deter future families from making the trek across the border."

Mark Morgan, who was picked to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement just weeks ago, did not reveal when an operation would occur or the scope of such an action. He maintained that the agency was still targeting its previous priorities, like removing those with criminal convictions, and that there was not a significant shift in operations.

In talking with reporters, however, Morgan focused on a group of 2,000 family units who recently arrived, were part of an expedited court process, ordered removed from the country, and given a notice earlier this year to work with ICE to leave voluntarily. Morgan said no undocumented immigrant was exempt from enforcement, including families.

"It's going to send a strong message to those individuals contemplating coming here illegally not to do so," he said. "Not only will we be enforcing the law, maintaining the integrity of the system, but we're also going to send a powerful message to individuals in the northern triangle countries: Do not come, do not risk it."

This, despite the fact that we know that people are traveling to the U.S. because they are in danger of violence and/or starvation, and at the same time that a U.N. report has found that there are currently 71 million refugees who "have been displaced worldwide by war, persecution, and other violence."

71 million.

That is "an increase of more than 2 million from a year earlier — and an overall total that would amount to the world's 20th most populous country."

It is a risk to stay. It is a risk to leave. There can be no effective "deterrence" when there are no good choices.

This is indefensible child abuse. Nothing more.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

You Are Not Alone

[Background image via Pixabay.]
If you are overwhelmed by the ruthless onslaught of the Trump Regime's malice that permeates the news every day—

If you are seized by sadness or rage at the ferocious sadism of their cruel agenda—

If you are feeling utterly impotent in trying to effectively counter any of the heinous attacks on vulnerable people that are coming ever more swiftly—

If you are disappointed in the people with power who are meant to take action they are refusing to take—

If you are stuck in a place with few like-minded allies, inundated instead with the hateful disgorgements of Republican cultists—

If you ache with heartbreak and indignation at the public celebrations of harm perpetrated on a mass scale—

If you wonder how the people designing and facilitating and defending that harm can live with themselves, and wonder equally how you can live with their actions being done in your name—

If you are drowning in a whirlpool of emotions so impenetrably oppressive that you can hardly tell where one ends and the next begins, as your anguish bleeds into your fury bleeds into your desperation bleeds into your fear—

If you are more frightened than you have ever been—

If you don't know from where your next bit of energy to stay engaged will come—

If you are battling intrusive thoughts that in turn battle each other for your focus, and your mind skips from election integrity to concentration camps to climate change to police violence to the erosion of abortion access to healthcare to this to that like a record spinning ceaselessly on a turntable you can't reach to quiet—

If you need to cry, or if you're already crying a lot—

If you need help—

If you don't know how you're supposed to keep doing the things that life obliges us to do every day when your country, our world, the entire planet seems to be falling into fascism—

If you are feeling hopeless—

If you are hanging on by your fingernails—

— know this: You are not alone.

We live in an era of official and pervasive gaslighting. There are people who want to tell you that you aren't seeing what you're seeing; that you don't have a legitimate reason to feel what you are feeling.

There are people who will insult you, harass you, threaten you for expressing the pain of the wounds being caused by this relentless trauma, in order to silence you. They will tell you that you are hysterical and weak.

There are people who insist, if you express the reverberating grief and anger bouncing around your insides like an unstoppable pinball, that you are overreacting; that you are oversensitive; that you are crazy.

You are none of these things.

You are empathetic and compassionate and willing to keep looking when others look away, because you care about other humans; because their lives matter to you.

You are strong and you are resisting and you are surviving.

And you are not alone.

[Related Reading: Malice Is His Agenda. Compassion Is Mine.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Trump Announces Massive Sweep of Undocumented Immigrants

[Content Note: Nativism; nativist language; stochastic terrorism.]

Yesterday, the State Department announced it was ending foreign aid for Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador unless and until the countries take "concrete actions to reduce the number of [undocumented] migrants coming to the U.S. border."

Many of the people who arrive at the U.S. border from Guatemala, Hondorus, and El Salvador are asylum-seekers fleeing violence, starvation, and/or extreme poverty. Eliminating foreign aid will only increase the numbers of people who are obliged to leave in search of safety.

I cannot see this move as anything but an attempt by Donald Trump to worsen the refugee crisis so he can further justify his malice, as ever using migrants and refugees as the canaries in his authoritarian coalmine.

Also yesterday, Trump announced, on Twitter, a massive sweep of undocumented immigrants across the United States: "Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people......."

At the Washington Post, Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti report that the round-up is happening at the urging of Trump and his "senior immigration advisor" Stephen Miller:

Trump and his senior immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, have been prodding Homeland Security officials to arrest and remove thousands of family members whose deportation orders were expedited by the Justice Department this year as part of a plan known as the "rocket docket."

In April, acting ICE director Ronald Vitiello and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen were ousted after they hesitated to go forward with the plan, expressing concerns about its preparation, effectiveness, and the risk of public outrage from images of migrant children being taken into custody or separated from their families.

Vitiello was replaced at ICE by former FBI and Border Patrol official Mark Morgan, who had impressed the president with statements on cable television in favor of harsh immigration enforcement measures.

In his first two weeks on the job at ICE, Morgan has said publicly that he plans to beef up interior enforcement and go after families with deportation orders, insisting that the rulings must be carried out to uphold the integrity of the country's legal system.

"Our next challenge is going to be interior enforcement," Morgan told reporters June 4 in Washington. "We will be going after individuals who have gone through due process and who have received final orders of deportation."

"That will include families," he said, adding that ICE agents will treat the parents and children they arrest "with compassion and humanity."

There is nothing compassionate nor humane about separating children from their parents, which causes lasting trauma to children. And there is a pervasive culture of dehumanization of immigrants among U.S. enforcers, which makes any promise of compassion or humanity a straight-up lie.

The sweep has the same inherent problem as Trump's plan to evict undocumented immigrants from public housing: There are countless families across the U.S. with mixed-immigration status. That is, the parents may be undocumented immigrants, while some or all of their children are U.S. citizens by virtue of having been born here:

The family arrest plan has been considered even more sensitive than a typical operation because children are involved, and Homeland Security officials retain significant concerns that families will be inadvertently separated by the operation, especially because parents in some households have deportation orders but their children — some of whom are U.S. citizens — might not. Should adults be arrested without their children because they are at school, day care, summer camp or a friend's house, it is possible parents could be deported while their children are left behind.

There are, of course, also no safeguards in place to ensure the rights of minor citizens are preserved.

(It's surely no coincidence that Trump announced this sickening removal plan the same week as the anniversary of DACA.)

ICE was reportedly stunned by Trump's public announcement, but they shouldn't be surprised. The announcement is firmly centered within Trump' ongoing campaign of stochastic terrorism. He was giving his rabidly nativist base a heads-up to invite their participation in the removal of people from the country.

Hate crimes against Latinx people has increased significantly since Trump was elected, with a 176% spike immediately following the election. His public announcement is a dogwhistle to his seething base that it's time to ramp up the harassment and hate crimes again, and he knows his most violent cultists don't care to make distinctions about someone's legal status before targeted them — which is why more Latinx people have reported being harassed and threatened just for speaking Spanish in public in the last several years, too.

The scope of the sweep — "millions" of people — is unfathomable. It's also impossible. ICE cannot remove "millions" of people from the population at once. But the exact number is hardly the point. Removing scores of people from their homes, all at once, all over the country, is sick. It will traumatize families, it will hurt communities, and it puts the U.S. in the company of nations whose purges of marginalized populations we once fought proudly to defeat.

Today, please share this information from RAICES, so that it is as widely available as possible:

Read more about your legal rights you have if ICE raid your work place in this helpful fact sheet @LegalAidAtWork put together: https://t.co/JZuRWsh7Oc

— RAICES (@RAICESTEXAS) June 18, 2019

And, if you are in the U.S., contact your representative and senators to let them know you strongly object to a nationwide purge of undocumented immigrants and urge them to support impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump immediately.

Other action items you can take:

1. Talk about this devilry to anyone who will listen. There's a lot of ignorance and indifference that those of us who care must urgently challenge.

2. Contact any local organizations who are providing social services and/or legal aid to undocumented immigrants. Ask them what they need.

3. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper and/or the closest big-city paper. A lot of folks still read those!

4. Support the work of individuals and/or advocacy organizations and/or news outlets who maintain focus on the crisis at the border in non-exploitative ways. That might mean financial support, or amplifying their work on social media, or volunteering your time (in the case of activist/legal orgs).

RESIST.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Republicans Protect Rapists' Parental Rights in Alabama

[Content Note: Sexual violence; anti-choicery; rape apologia; hostility to consent.]

As I have regrettably had occasion to observe many, many times in this space over the last 14 years, the Republican Party does not have a solid history of taking sexual assault seriously, to put it mildly.

There was that time House Republicans tried to redefine rape so that it was only "real" rape if it involved force. Then there was the time that Senate Republicans blocked votes on military sexual assault legislation. There was that other time New York state Republicans blocked a proposal to eliminate the statute of limitations on child sexual abuse. And let's not forget that time when Georgia state Republicans didn't want to consider a proposal on rape kits and accused the Democratic sponsor of "politicizing" the issue to get votes.

There was that time former GOP Senator and two-time presidential candidate Rick Santorum said that pregnant rape victims should make the best out of a bad situation. And that time former GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin argued that pregnancy from rape is really rare, because "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." And that time Akin also accused women of lying about rape. And that time GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that getting pregnant from rape is god's plan. And all the times Republicans have told women how to avoid getting ourselves raped, as if it's our responsibility to stop rapists rather than predators' responsibility to not rape people.

There's Joe Walsh. And John Koster. And Phil Gingrey. And Thomas Corbin. And Jonathan Stickland. And Roy Moore. And Blake Farenthold. Just the tip of the iceberg of Republican politicians who have said stupid shit about sexual assault and/or been accused of sexual assault themselves.

And then there's the current Republican president, whose opening salvo in his campaign was to call undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists; who compared trade deficits to rape — twice; who is himself a confessed serial sex abuser; and whose Secretary of Education has rewritten campus assault guidlines to favor predators; and whose Supreme Court justice was confirmed despite (or because of) credible allegations of sexual assault.

This is hardly a comprehensive list. The litany of examples of Republicans blocking legislation that would address sexual assault or support survivors, and of Republicans saying inappropriate things about rape and/or its victims, and of Republicans who have themselves engaged in sexual harassment and/or assault is interminable. And intolerable.

Which is all preface to say that it it not surprising, but it is nonetheless absolutely rage-making that the Republican Party of Alabama continues to protect rapists' parental rights while eroding pregnant people's bodily autonomy and rights to access a legal healthcare procedure to terminate their pregnancies.

Emily Wax-Thibodeaux at the Washington Post reports:

Alabama is one of two states with no statute terminating parental rights for a person found to have conceived the child by rape or incest, a fact that has gained fresh relevance since its lawmakers adopted the nation's strictest abortion ban in May. That statute even outlaws the procedure for victims of sexual assault and jails doctors who perform it, except in cases of serious risk to the woman’s health.

...Last month, Alabama lawmakers considered a bill that addressed ending parental rights in cases of rape that result in conception, but the legislature removed that language, limiting the law to cases in which people sexually assault their children. State Sen. Vivian Figures (D)...said she didn't know Alabama lacked a statute preventing rapists from gaining custody of their offspring but told The Washington Post that she now plans to introduce a bill in the next legislative session.

"It's just...unfair and even dangerous to these mothers and children," said Figures, who voted against the state's abortion ban.

There is much more at the link.

Naturally, opponents of a law limiting rapists' access to children conceived via rape are relying on ancient narratives about women being liars who constantly allege rape fraudulently in order to defend not having a law that protects victims from having to maintain contact with men who raped them. Women, they say, will lie about having been raped in order to deny fathers access to their children.

Suffice it to say, these men's rights advocates are not concerned in the slightest about the possibility that rapists will leverage impregnating their victims in order to guarantee a lifetime of access to them, despite the fact that reproductive coercion is a documented endemic phenomenon, while women accusing men of rape to deny them parental rights is not.

Republicans' hostility to consent is legendary and central to their ideology. And we must be blunt about this: They are empowering rapists as part of their war on agency. This isn't just a fortunate byproduct of their contempt for women's agency; abetting rapists' control over women's reproduction is by design.

Republican leadership at any level of government is an urgent health crisis and a pressing safety issue for women. That is not a matter of opinion. It is a fact.

[Related Reading: #StopTheBans.]

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Malice Is His Agenda. Compassion Is Mine.

Photo: Me looking out at New York City, a city I love and the hometown of Donald Trump, from the top of the Empire State Building on a foggy day in May of 2011, taken by Iain.
Malice is the agenda. I write the words again, and again. Malice is the agenda. I write them again, on another day. Malice is the agenda. I write them over and over, so that people know it's true.

We have a president who hurts people.

All U.S. presidents have hurt people. That is the nature of being the head of state and the head of government of a country that is both global power and empire. Presidents hurt people even when they don't want to hurt people.

This president wants to hurt people. Malice is the agenda.

I hate this president. I hate him with the fiery power of ten thousand suns. I despise his reprehensible agenda of relentless abuse, and I abhor the members of his party and his deplorable base who enable him and shield him from consequences, and I find him a singularly loathsome specimen who deserves not a speck of human kindness.

I want there to be no possibility of mistaking my position on the execrable wastrel soiling the Oval Office with his odious presence and putrid ideas, so I am urgently compelled, obliged, to frequently express my undiluted hatred of him, his contemptible values, and everything for which he stands.

I express, often and bluntly, that I hate him.

When I do, this is what happens: Shambling wrecks in red caps bearing his racist brand, who loiter on social media to disgorge their undulating bigotry at anyone who dares criticize their god-king, pop up to gloat at my despair. One of the favorites among their lexicon of reflexive, unoriginal attempts to own the libs is that their dirtbag president "is living rent-free" inside my head.

Given the enormous amount of time I spend curating news about his sadistic devilry, one might assume the trolls have a point. Stopped clocks, and all that.

But, despite the time I spend writing about the rotten shitwheel who haunts the West Wing, I don't actually think about him all that much.

I neither want nor need to give much time to contemplating his many evident personal flaws, as I knew everything there was to know about this wicked, abusive, conniving, spoiled, lazy, deceitful, vindictive, resentful, grandiose, insatiable, petty, insecure, unhappy, authoritarian puppet long before he was inaugurated.

When I read and write about his presidency, and the ways he is subverting our democracy and enacting terrifyingly harmful policy, it isn't him about which I'm thinking. It is the people who he is harming.

When I lie awake at night, because something, any one of a number of things, is filling me with dread, it isn't him about which I'm thinking. It is the people who will be harmed if that thing comes to pass.

When I listen to my friends who are mothers express their fears for their children's futures, it isn't him about which I'm thinking. It's their children.

When I am watching TV or reading a book or playing a game, just trying to find some elusive stillness for my anxious mind, and invasive worries come unbidden, it isn't him about which I'm thinking. It is the people, all of us, and what our future holds.

When I get up from my desk, trying to escape, just for a moment, and I walk into the back garden with my dogs, feeling the grass under my feet and the breeze through my hair, and the scent of lilac and freshly cut grass fills my nose, and I am overcome with gratitude for this perfect moment of peace, and then that moment is shattered, interrupted by an alert on my phone about some fresh new hell, it isn't him who comes first to my mind, even when it's his name I read. It is the people who are reading the same alert I am, or will read the words I write about it, who will feel angry or scared or confused or helpless or hopeless.

It is people, always people, who occupy my thoughts.

It is all the people who didn't want this, who voted against it, against him, way more of us who are nonetheless now subjected to his sickening whims. All the people who weren't allowed to vote. All the people who couldn't. All the children who have no say over decisions that will determine their future and whether they even have one.

It is women who want and need their agency and equal pay and safety from violence. It is families being torn apart at the border. It is black and brown people who are being targeted by violent eliminationists and cannot even turn to police who may kill them just as soon as help them. It is Jewish people horrified by reemergent anti-Semitism and Muslim people tortured by "travel bans."

It is queer people fearful of losing rights they only just acquired. It is indigenous people standing on the front lines of climate change. It is scientists who are losing their funding and people with chronic illness whose relief is being pushed further out of reach. It is veterans who are in desperate need of help.

It is disabled people and poor people and people who lack insurance and people experiencing food insecurity and homeless people and people who don't have access to clean drinking water and—

These are the people in my head when I say I hate him. They are legion, and they leave no space for his occupancy.

I mean what I say when I say that I hate him, but, more importantly, I mean that I care about the people he wants to harm.

I feel a resonating empathy with the people targeted by his relentless deployment of sickening malice; a profound love for the people who take up space beside me in resistance to that malice; and a reverberating joy when I share even the briefest of moments of connection with other people, out in the world, strangers whose eyes meet and acknowledge each other's humanity in our shared survival.

My moments of joy are filled with thoughts of my people and our future. The moments I am crying are filled with thoughts of my people and our future. The moments I am optimistic and the moments I am distraught; the moments I have hope and the moments I am drowning, demoralized. I live in a mind that reverberates with a cacophonic plea for rescue from the destruction of all we value.

My own voice clangs with the rest. Thinking about the people for whose lives I advocate is an act of self-care. I don't know that I've survived worse, and I don't know that I will survive at all, but I am sure going to try.

Two days after the 2016 election, I vowed that love will be the center of my resistance. And so it is. The uglier he and his abettors get, the harder I love.

It is, deep within me, a reflexive resistance to malice. They will have to grind me to dust to extinguish that flame.

Malice is his agenda.

Compassion is mine.

But I can spare not an ounce of it for him. The only thing I want for him is obsolescence. Swift and abiding. And for the rest of us: A future where no one could even imagine that we'd be thinking about him at all.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!