Good morning.
A new month begins in Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 6:34 PM, for 11h 41m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Valentin Blatz is born this day in 1826: “On this date Valentin(e) Blatz, founder of the Blatz Brewing Co., was born at Miltenberg-on-the-Main, Bavaria. The son of Casper and Barbara Blatz, his father owned a brewery in Miltenberg. Valentine Blatz migrated to New York in August 1848 and moved to Milwaukee in 1849. Blatz operated one of the most successful breweries in Milwaukee. [Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Archive]” On this day in 1861, On this day in 1861, the 4th and 5th Wisconsin Light Artillery Batteries muster in: “Recruited in various towns around the state, the batteries gathered at Camp Utley in Racine for training. They spent three months learning how to transport and operate cannons before heading to different parts of the Southern front in January 1862.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn writes that These Numbers Show Just How Bad Trump Has Been for Immigrants:
Between January and July of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal history skyrocketed by more than 200 percent, according to a Reuters analysis—jumping from 1,411 arrests in January to a whopping 4,399 in July. Arrests of immigrants with criminal records have also increased but by a much smaller margin of 17 percent.
Reuters’ findings demonstrate the chilling effects of President Trump’s crackdown—and that his policies have led to repercussions across the justice system and multiple borders….
While Reuters only looks at data through July, the Washington Post reports the trend is ongoing; immigrants without criminal records have become the fastest-growing category
of ICE arrests this year….Reuters also found that immigrants’ lives in the US are more imperiled because those who were previously spared from deportation orders under the Obama administration are now seeing their cases reopened. Between March and May, the Trump administration has requested the courts reopen more than 1,300 cases. During that same period, the Obama administration requested 430.
John Burnett reports Border Patrol Arrests Parents While Infant Awaits Serious Operation:
When 2-month-old Isaac Enrique Sanchez was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis, a condition that causes vomiting, dehydration and weight loss in infants, his parents were told that their son’s condition was curable. The problem was that no hospital in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas had a pediatric surgery team capable of performing the operation on his stomach.
To make Isaac well, Oscar and Irma Sanchez would need to take their infant son to Driscoll Children’s Hospital, in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was just a couple of hours up the highway, but for them it was a world away.
The Sanchezes, who are undocumented, would need to pass a Border Patrol checkpoint.
“The nurse told us we had to go there,” Oscar says in Spanish. “We said we couldn’t go.”
While they pondered their predicament in a Harlingen, Texas, hospital, a Border Patrol agent showed up in the waiting room — Oscar Sanchez suspects a nurse turned them in — and said he could arrange for officers to escort the parents through the checkpoint to Corpus. But the agent said when they arrived, they would be arrested and put into deportation proceedings. The couple agreed.
The events that followed at the Corpus Christi hospital are the latest developments in a national controversy over so-called sensitive locations. Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a policy that immigration agents should avoid enforcement actions at hospitals, schools, churches and public demonstrations unless there are special circumstances….
Advocates are puzzled why the Border Patrol chose to put the Sanchezes under such intense supervision, which one would expect for higher-value targets like drug traffickers or MS-13 gang members. The couple has no criminal records. They overstayed visitors visas that were issued 12 years ago. He works construction and landscaping; she stays home with their four children, all of whom are citizens.
David Corn asks Who’s Telling the Truth About the Russia Meeting: Kushner or Trump Jr.?:
For months, Donald Trump and his lieutenants insisted there was no collusion between the Trump crowd and Vladimir Putin’s regime during the 2016 election. But after news broke of the June 9, 2016, meeting that brought Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort together with a Kremlin emissary bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a secret Russia government effort to help Trump, no one could accurately say there had been no collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. So the Trump crew then shifted its denials and claimed that nothing came out of the meeting. But given that the Trump camp first covered up the existence of the meeting and then lied about its origin and purpose—until Trump Jr. was forced to release emails about the gathering—there is no good reason to accept the assertion that the session was a bust. Moreover, a review of the recent statements issued by Trump Jr. and Kushner about the meeting reveals an important contradiction between their accounts.
The emails sent before the meeting indicated that a representative of the Russian prosecutor general would be conveying government information that the Trump campaign could use against Clinton, and Trump Jr. expressed enthusiasm about this prospect. Kushner and Manafort received those emails, as well. Both Kushner and Trump Jr. have recently put out similar statements that dismiss the whole episode as a nothing-burger. But there is an intriguing difference in their recollections….
What’s different? Trump Jr. recounted that Kushner was present when Veselnitskaya discussed contributions to Clinton and the DNC that the Russians thought could somehow be used against Clinton. Kushner asserted he only heard the Russian lawyer talk about the adoption issue.
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials, under pressure from the White House to provide a rationale for reducing the number of refugees allowed into the United States next year, rejected a study by the Department of Health and Human Services that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
The draft report, which was obtained by The New York Times, contradicts a central argument made by advocates of deep cuts in refugee totals as President Trump faces an Oct. 1 deadline to decide on an allowable number. The issue has sparked intense debate within his administration as opponents of the program, led by Mr. Trump’s chief policy adviser, Stephen Miller, assert that continuing to welcome refugees is too costly and raises concerns about terrorism.
Advocates of the program inside and outside the administration say refugees are a major benefit to the United States, paying more in taxes than they consume in public benefits, and filling jobs in service industries that others will not. But research documenting their fiscal upside — prepared for a report mandated by Mr. Trump in a March presidential memorandum implementing his travel ban — never made its way to the White House. Some of those proponents believe the report was suppressed.
The internal study, which was completed in late July but never publicly released, found that refugees “contributed an estimated $269.1 billion in revenues to all levels of government” between 2005 and 2014 through the payment of federal, state and local taxes. “Overall, this report estimated that the net fiscal impact of refugees was positive over the 10-year period, at $63 billion”….