How Does It Feel To Have Someone In The White House Working Against The Best Interests Of The Country And Its Citizens?

Can anyone deny that for Putin, the Russian investment in the election of Trump, is the gift that keeps on giving? In his NY Times column yesterday, Republican pundit David Brooks observed that "The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing." As David Graham pointed out in his piece for The Atlantic Monday, The Worse Things Are, the Better They Are for Trump, the last moves by the satanic pig-fucker Putin put in the White House "suggest his goal is not to fix the system, but to exacerbate turmoil for political gain... Trump and Lenin share a strategic instinct. Lenin reportedly said, 'The worse, the better'-- meaning that conditions that were more miserable for the people were likely to help his political aims. Trump’s approach to immigration and health care, both in the past few days and throughout his presidency, evince a similar understanding of power."

A friend of mine, an independent who has never contributed politically except twice to Bernie, once in 2016 and once this year, always tells me that if Trump cleans up the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) problem, he'll be reelected. I've been telling him for over 2 years that Trump hasn't the tiniest interest in cleaning up the MS-13 problem, only of exacerbating it so he can use it to scare his low-IQ base.

Graham continued that last week Señor Trumpanzee announced plans to end assistance to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, or as Fox & Friends put it, "3 Mexican countries." Señor T on Friday: "No money goes there anymore. We’re giving them tremendous aid. We stopped payment." That's about $450 million, including money to support law-enforcement efforts against gangs. "The actual cash is a minimal amount-- a little less than 8 percent of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded for his border wall when he shut down the government in December, and less than 2 percent of the $25 billion the administration estimates the wall would cost overall. The fact that the aid numbers are small doesn’t justify spending them per se, but there’s a strong consensus among Latin America experts that these cuts are counterproductive. It’s common to talk about push and pull factors in immigration. Pull factors are things that draw migrants to a new country: the promise of better work, for example. Push factors are those things that drive migrants to leave home: unstable politics, high crime, poor economies. Trump has worked to reduce one pull factor by trying to make it harder to get asylum, but he has limited options beyond that, because no president wants to make the economy worse in order to deter immigration (though Trump has been willing to risk hurting the economy to install protectionist tariffs). But Trump’s decision to cut aid to countries that are major sources of immigrants to the United States seems likely to only increase the push factors, driving more people to attempt the journey as conditions in their home countries stagnate or worsen."

Many of Trump’s decisions on border issues seem designed not to solve any problem. This includes Trump’s standing threat to close the border with Mexico; his decision to end DACA, a program that he has said achieves goals he favors; and most prominently, his decision to separate unauthorized immigrant families arriving at the border. None of these do anything to solve or reduce what Trump has called a crisis at the border. In fact, they are likely to only worsen the crisis. Separations, for example, became a costly and distracting circus, taking up already short space in detention centers and then necessitating a major effort to reunite families and restore the status quo ante when courts predictably rejected the policy.

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

The same dynamic holds true on Obamacare. Last week, the White House told a federal appeals court that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out entirely. Trump then announced that he was calling on Congress to produce a replacement for the law. The decision was reportedly made over the objections of Trump’s attorney general and secretary of health and human services, and it has received a chilly reception from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

When the GOP controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018, it tried at length to repeal Obamacare and failed, and there’s no chance a Democratic House will be amenable to rescinding or replacing the law. In the absence of legislative movement, Trump has worked to weaken the ACA throughout his presidency. He has cut back on outreach and advertisement, slashed subsidies, supported repeal of the individual mandate, and enabled so-called association health plans, which a judge struck down last week, calling them “clearly an end-run” around the law.

The cynicism of Trump’s latest move on the ACA runs deep. The administration still doesn’t have any plan for what it actually wants to do on health care. Meanwhile, Axios's Jonathan Swan reports that the president doesn’t expect to win in the courts: “Trump has privately said he thinks the lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act will probably fail in the courts, according to two sources who discussed the matter with the president last week.” For Trump, it’s a political win-win. Either he gets Obamacare thrown out, or judges rule against him, giving him another chance to rail against the judicial system, delegitimizing it and further undermining the rule of law.

None of these steps would make any sense if Trump’s goal was to improve health care, just as cutting aid to the Northern Triangle would make no sense if the president wanted to reduce immigration. But increasing turmoil is the point, since the worse things are, the better things are. For Donald Trump, at least.

Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian

In the file of "purposely making things worse for political gain, let's also look at a development Betsy Woodruff reported on Tuesday for the Daily Beast: Homeland Security Disbands Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit. This is a win-win in Trumpworld: a wink and a nod to his neo-Nazi support base and a way to make a bad problem worse. What could be more Trumpian? "The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism," reported Woodruff. "Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism-- including white supremacist terrorism-- is growing. 'It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,' one former intelligence official told the Daily Beast."

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Former officials pointed to a spate of domestic terror attacks in recent years as evidence that DHS erred by shuttering this branch. From the massacre that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue to a shooting targeting Republican members of Congress in June 2018 to bomb threats that a deranged Trump fan directed at prominent Democrats and CNN, violent attacks informed by homegrown hatred have left Americans increasingly terrorized.

...Nate Snyder, a former DHS official who focused on violent extremism, said the department’s move undercuts Trump administration claims that it takes domestic terror seriously.

“You hear the secretary and this administration say how domestic terrorism is a clear priority and how resources will be bolstered, but you can’t say that and then all of a sudden get rid of the unit that’s there to detect threats and share information with our first responders, law enforcement, and federal partners,” Snyder said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

All Aboard! by Nancy Ohanian

Trumpanzee Lying About MS-13 Too-- And Why Would That Be Different From Everything Else He Lies About

I'm so worried about my housekeeper-- not just because she's been away for two weeks and my house is a mess. She's a U.S. citizen visiting her family in El Salvador, which, according to Señor Trumpanzee, is being overrun by deportees from the vicious criminal gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), the gang he's rounding up and sending back to that country. One of my closest friends, a Trump hater, has told me that if he gets rid of MS-13 it will have been worth having Trumpanzee as president. But is it true? Earlier today, a new poll from Survey Monkey found that only 13% of Americans find Trump to be honest and trustworthy. So... is Trump actually getting rid of MS-13, "by the thousands." Since Trump tends to lie about everything all the time, PolitiFact took a look.

On Tuesday, at a over-wrought made-for-TV ceremony Trump babbled that "Recently, MS-13 gang members called for the assassination of New York City police officers so the gang could quote, 'take back the streets.' They got it wrong. We are the ones who are taking back the streets. We are getting them out of our country by the thousands. Every week we're setting new records on-- we have a 'catch and release' program, too. It’s called we catch them and we release them in the country they came back from, we are getting them out. Or we are putting them in prison."

ICE does not track gang removals by specific gang, but the agency does specifically target MS-13 members for arrest and removal on the basis of their immigration violations, said Matthew Bourke, a spokesman for the agency.

Bourke said 5,396 gang members were removed in fiscal year 2017 (which includes about four months of the Obama administration, running from Oct. 1, 2016 through Sept. 30, 2017).

From Oct. 1, 2017 through Dec. 16, 2017 (the latest data available), 1,082 gang members were removed.

It’s impossible to determine how many of them were MS-13 gang members.

There is other data indicating the Trump administration’s efforts to deport MS-13 gang members, but that doesn’t necessarily support Trump’s claim.

ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division arrested nearly 800 MS-13 gang members in fiscal year 2017. 

ICE’s investigations division arrested 405 MS-13 gang members, Bourke said, citing first-quarter data for fiscal year 2018.

"The time it takes to remove a validated gang member can vary depending on whether the alien has started removal proceedings; whether the alien has a final order of removal; or whether the alien has pending criminal charges in a local jurisdiction," Bourke said.

It’s unlikely that all of the MS-13 gang members arrested in 2017 were already deported, because of the time required to remove someone after an arrest, said Jorja Leap, an anthropologist and adjunct professor at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs who researches gangs and criminal justice.

"Most members of MS-13 that I know that have been arrested are being held in court pending trial," Leap said. "The process is lengthy."

Our ruling

Trump said of MS-13 gang members, "We are getting them out of our country by the thousands."

It’s difficult to determine how many MS-13 members have been deported under Trump’s administration, because immigration officials don’t break down deportation data by gang affiliation.

At least 1,200 MS-13 gang members were arrested from Oct. 1, 2016, through the end of Trump’s first calendar year. The time between an arrest and deportation varies per case, but an expert told us the process is lengthy.

Trump’s statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate it Mostly False.

CNN reported early in March that Trump is pumping up the numbers by having ICE deport more non-criminal immigrants. "A businessman and father from Ohio. An Arizona mother. The Indiana husband of a Trump supporter. They were unassuming members of their community, parents of US citizens and undocumented," reported CNN. "And they were deported by the Trump administration. It's left many wondering why the US government is arresting and deporting a number of individuals who have often lived in the country for decades, checked in regularly with immigration officials and posed no danger to their community. Many have family members who are American citizens, including school-aged children. President Donald Trump famously said in a presidential debate that his focus is getting the 'bad hombres' and the 'bad, bad people' out first to secure the border, but one of his first actions after taking office was an executive order that effectively granted immigration agents the authority to arrest and detain any undocumented immigrant they wanted.

Where the Obama administration focused deportation efforts almost exclusively on criminals and national security threats, as well as immigrants who recently arrived illegally, the Trump administration has also targeted immigrants with what are called final orders of removal-- an order from a judge that a person can be deported and has no more appeals left.

In Trump's first year, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 109,000 criminals and 46,000 people without criminal records -- a 171% increase in the number of non-criminal individuals arrested over 2016.

The Trump administration regularly says its focus is criminals and safety threats, but has also repeatedly made clear that no one in the country illegally will be exempted from enforcement

. "We target criminal aliens, but we're not going to exempt an entire class of (non)citizens," Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton told reporters Wednesday.

"All of those in violation of immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States," ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez added in a statement.

Critics say including people with decades-old final orders of removal as priorities is more about boosting numbers by targeting easily catchable individuals than about public safety threats.

"A final order of removal is absolutely not indicative of a person's threat to public safety," said former Obama administration ICE chief and DHS counsel John Sandweg. "You cannot equate convicted criminals with final orders of removal."

Sandweg said that people with final orders, especially those who are checking in regularly with ICE, are easy to locate and can be immediately deported without much legal recourse. Identifying and locating criminals and gang members takes more investigative work.

There are more than 90,000 people on so-called orders of supervision who check in regularly with ICE officials, according to the agency. And there are more than 1 million who have removal proceedings pending or who have been ordered to leave the country but have not.

As a result of the change in ICE policy, headlines about heart-wrenching cases of deportation separating children from parents or caregivers have been a regular occurrence.

..."We shouldn't spend one penny on low-hanging fruit," said Sarah Saldana, the most recent director of ICE before Trump's inauguration. "What we should be spending money is on getting people who are truly a threat to public safety."

Trumpanzee And His GOP Enablers Would Rather Deport Latinos Than Get Serious About MS-13

Nancy Ohanian looks at Trumpanzee

Eliminating MS-13 and other violent criminal gangs should be a priority for law enforcement that all Americans should support. But that isn't what Barbara Comstock's Criminal Alien Gang Member Removal Act (H.R. 3697) is actually about. Her bill passed last week 233-175. Only one Republican, libertarian Justin Amash (MI), voted against it. 11 fake-Democrats took the bait and crossed the aisle to vote with the Republicans. Now Ryan is running around claiming the bill passed with "bipartisan support."

The 11 Democrats who voted for it are the worst of the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, primarily Blue Dogs and New Dems who consistently support the Republican Party policy agenda. Only one-- Ruben Kihuen-- hasn't earned an "F" from ProgressivePunch (and he has a "C"). These are the Democrats who gave Ryan and McCarthy the right to call the bill "bipartisan."

• Salud Carbajal (CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ)
• Ruben Kihuen (New Dem-NV)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Stephanie Murphy (Blue Dog-FL)
• Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Jacky Rosen (NV)
• Raul Ruiz (CA)
• Kirsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)

The bill is not a crime-fighting bill or even an anti-gang bill. It's just a bill meant to label immigrants the GOP doesn't like as criminals. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said the bill could be easily used to target groups of people who aren't gangs-- religious organistions particularly. "This may seem reasonable until you look at the offenses listed," she said. "These offenses could sweep in many people that no reasonable person would think of as a gang member. That means that under this bill, a religious organization that aids undocumented immigrants could be a criminal gang." It was no surprise that Chicago patriot Luis Gutiérrez would be one of the leaders among Democrats in exposing the legislation for what it really is-- and isn't:

While the President is playing deal or no deal with the lives of DREAMers, Speaker Ryan is allowing House Republicans to vote on a bill that labels as many immigrant youth as possible as gang members and makes it easier to deport them. He could be moving the bipartisan DREAM Act forward, but instead, he wants to make it very clear that Republicans see Latinos and immigrants as a threat to the U.S., not an asset. Hundreds of thousands of doctors, teachers, nurses and soldiers are going to be yanked from the American economy if Speaker Ryan does not allow the DREAM Act to go forward in the next few weeks, but his priority is feeding red meat to the anti-immigration wing of his party and satisfying them with a big helping of ‘let’s label Latino youth as machete-wielding menaces.’” This is not a bill to curtail violence or make the country safer, it is a political bill to allow Republicans in the House to make speeches about urging Americans to fear young immigrants.

It is clear that Democrats and Republicans would prefer to be talking about the DREAM Act and showing the country that we can act in a bipartisan manner to resolve the status of DACA recipients and other immigrants who were raised in the U.S. I am committed to not exchanging the safety of DREAMers for more deportations or further restricting legal immigration so that there are no available legal avenues for immigrants who help feed us, build our communities and serve our country. But the priorities of House Republicans seem inconsistent with what the American people, the majority of House Members and their own voters want them to do.

Juan Vargas, a California New Dem, tried talking his New Dem colleagues out of voting for the bill-- and mostly succeeded. His point was that the "bill would result in the targeting of persons of faith, religious leaders, and faith-based organizations, who are compelled by their beliefs to open their doors to vulnerable migrants seeking safety and respite. For many in the faith community, this action is deeply rooted in religious expression and goes directly to the core of our American values as protected by First Amendment expression. The broad provisions of this bill, which purportedly targets gang members, would lead to attempts to criminalize religious groups across the country as gang members simply because they answered the call of their faith. As people of faith, we are called to love our neighbor and welcome the stranger. This bill would functionally criminalize individuals who aid undocumented immigrants as gang members under an expanded harboring statute.  The Catholic community has raised alarms over this statute in the past and is concerned that this bill could result in groups of nuns being classified as 'gangs.' There is no humanitarian exception provided in the bill and the federal government has a record of penalizing individuals who provide humanitarian relief to migrants."

He continued in a very personal way: "As a person of faith, my Catholic upbringing and time in the Jesuit order has impressed upon me the duty to speak for those less fortunate among us…for the oppressed, for the poor and for the voiceless. As leaders of this great nation, we must act in a way that reflects the best of our national values and that reflects the best of who we are as Americans. We should not contribute to a climate of fear by criminalizing humanitarian aid to undocumented immigrants. Matthew 25 gibes me, and others that believe as I do, clear direction on how we are to treat the least among us."

Trump, of course, loves the bill and it is going to the Senate now. Stephen Lendman of Global Research labeled it "a police state measure" which define "a criminal gang as a "group, club, organization, or association of 5 or more persons that has as one of its primary purposes the commission of 1 or more of the following criminal offenses and the members of which engage, or have engaged within the past 5 years, in a continuing series of such offenses, or that has been designated as a criminal gang by the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Attorney General, as meeting these criteria. The offenses described, whether in violation of Federal or State law or foreign law and regardless of whether the offenses occurred before, on, or after the date of the enactment of this paragraph, are the following:”

▪ felony drug offenses;
▪ aiding unwanted immigrants;
violent offenses;
▪ obstructing justice;
▪ and other alleged violations of US laws, shifting responsibility to prove innocence on targeted individuals, not authorities as mandated under international and constitutional law.

And the bill is even worse than it appears at first glance.

Any immigrant suspected or alleged to be a gang member can be deported. US prisons are filled with wrongfully convicted men, women, youths, and children, mostly people of color.

HR 3697 is a vehicle for the manufacture of human and civil rights abuses, disgraceful legislation, its provisions no just society would tolerate.

It creates a sweeping new definition of “gang member,” giving authorities broad latitude to target social and political groups, clubs, even churches or other religious organizations.

It expands the use of mandatory, no-bond arbitrary detentions, a flagrant violation of international law. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits arbitrarily detaining anyone.

Refugees and asylum seekers will be deterred from seeking refuge in America.

It’ll subject law-abiding immigrants to flagrant abuses of power, including Fifth Amendment equal protection rights.

It’ll permit sweeping roundups of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers of color, mainly Latinos. Living in the wrong neighborhood would risk deportation.

So could wearing the wrong colored clothing or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sweeping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) roundups are notoriously indiscriminate, many individuals guilty of nothing abusively detained under deplorable conditions and deported.

HR 3697 authorizes deportations if there’s “reason to believe” so-called gang affiliation or association, no credible proof required.

Expansive language permits sweeping up law-abiding people indiscriminately, children as vulnerable as adults.

DHS can target anyone based on secret evidence, classified evidence, no evidence or any pretext cited-- without due process, constitutional protections denied.

Humanitarian relief can be denied individuals fleeing persecution from designated countries.

No one was surprised when a Gutiérrez neighbor, Chicago's far right Blue Dog Dan Lipinski, stuck with Ryan and Trump and voted against the Democratic position-- and against the interests of his own IL-03 constituents. His progressive primary opponent, Marie Newman, told us that once again Lipinski showed "that he's perfectly aligned with President Trump and the Republicans on the issue of immigration. By voting for H.R. 3697, Lipinski voted to increase racial profiling and the arrest of people of color on the mere suspicion that they're involved in criminal activity. Democrats in Congress ought to be focused on protecting Dreamers and keeping families together, not satiating President Trump's absurd views on Latinos." If you agree with Marie on this, please help her repeal and replace Dan Lipinski here. Hers is one of the few races in the country where a credible progressive is challenging a fake Democrat in a race that's going to go down to the wire.

There are only two Republican-held Senate seats that Schumer's DSCC thinks it can probably win in 2018: Flake's seat in Arizona and Heller's seat in Nevada. Both of his very conservative, hand-picked recruits, Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Jacky Rosen (NV) were among the 11 rogue Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who supported this dreadful and deceptive legislation. Neither of these exceptionally bad candidates has any chance of winning without heavy Latino turnout. Neither is Latino in increasingly Latino-dominated states and in states where Latinos are becoming very cognizant of who their community's friends really are when push comes to shove. But these are the kinds of establishment GOP-lite candidates Schumer has always gravitated to for his entire career. Not just Arizona and Nevada, but all of America will suffer because of his inability to learn from his mistakes.