Good morning.
Thursday, the first day of summer, will in Whitewater be rainy with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 20m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1788, the U.S. Constitution is ratified:
Delaware, on December 7, 1787, became the first State to ratify the new Constitution, with its vote being unanimous. Pennsylvania ratified on December 12, 1787, by a vote of 46 to 23 (66.67%). New Jersey ratified on December 19, 1787, and Georgia on January 2, 1788, both with unanimous votes. The requirement of ratification by nine states, set by Article Seven of the Constitution, was met when New Hampshire voted to ratify, on June 21, 1788.
Recommended for reading in full —
Julia Preston writes What You Should Know About Family Separations (“Yes, it’s Trump policy. No, it’s not the law”):Okay. So doesn’t the law require children to be separated from parents caught crossing illegally?
No, it doesn’t.
The surge in children separated from parents since May 7 is directly related to the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy. This is convoluted, so bear with me.
Under that policy, parents apprehended at the border have been transferred from Customs and Border Protection, an agency that includes the Border Patrol and is part of DHS, into the custody of the United States Marshals Service. Those are the law enforcement officers who handle movements of people on trial in federal courts. The parents have been held in federal pre-trial detention.
Their children don’t go with them. When the parents and their children crossed the border, they were together, forming what DHS officials call a family unit. Under the new policy, when the parent is transferred to federal court, DHS officials are re-classifying their children as unaccompanied minors—the term for children who arrived at a United States border without a parent or legal guardian. The children are physically separated from their parents. They are sent to deportation proceedings in immigration court, separate from their parents. And, by law, DHS border officials are required within 72 hours to transfer the children to the custody of yet another federal agency: the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS. The children are held in shelters overseen by health officials, mostly administered by private contractors, which are closed to the public.
Can DHS officials just declare that a child who crossed the border with a parent now suddenly is unaccompanied, and separate them to be sent to HHS shelters?
Good question.
DHS officials say they have broad authority to make these determinations. But until the zero tolerance policy, DHS officials were identifying children as unaccompanied only if there was no parent or legal guardian with them “at the time of apprehension.”
The explicit intent of several laws and federal court rulings governing the handling of children at the border is that they should always be treated with special care. In general under American law, disrupting or severing the relationship between a child and their parent is a severe measure to be taken when less harsh alternatives are not available.
William Wan reports The trauma of separation lingers long after children are reunited with parents:
“It’s not like an auto body shop where you fix the dent and everything looks like new. We’re talking about children’s minds,” said Luis H. Zayas, professor of social work and psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin. “Our government should be paying for this. We did the harm; we should be responsible for fixing the damage. But the sad thing for most of these kids is this trauma is likely to go untreated.”
Children who have undergone traumatic separation often cling desperately to their parents after they are reunited and refuse to let them out of their sight, say therapists and child psychologists. Many suffer from separation anxiety, cry uncontrollably and have trouble sleeping because of recurring nightmares.
Others develop eating disorders, problems with trust and unresolved anger, in some cases against their parents.
Chris Geidner reports No Immediate Changes Planned For Children Already Separated Under Trump Policy, HHS Officials Say (“It is still very early and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter”):
Philip Rucker writes of ‘A blowtorch to the tinder’: Stoking racial tensions is a feature of Trump’s presidency:Although the executive order signing followed days of national outcry over the policy, it was not immediately clear what effect the order would have on new migrant families crossing the border — and federal officials were unclear Wednesday night about whether there would be any changes for those families already separated.
On the question of what happens to the more than 2,000 children already separated from their parent or parents over the past two months, the initial answer from the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for “unaccompanied” minors, was that nothing would change immediately.
“For the minors currently in the unaccompanied alien children program, the sponsorship process will proceed as usual,” HHS spokesperson Kenneth Wolfe told BuzzFeed News.
Hours later, a more senior spokesperson said in a statement that Wolfe “misspoke earlier regarding the Executive Order signed today by the President.” That spokesperson, Brian Marriott, went on to say, “It is still very early and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter” — while noting that “[r]eunification is always the ultimate goal.”
Consider The Elephant’s Superb Nose:President Trump this week likened Hispanic immigrants to vermin. He warned that they would “pour into and infest our country.” And he defended his administration’s family separation policy by alleging that parents crossing the southern border with their children were poised to commit crime and murder.
For him, this language is not new.
Echoing the words and images of the white nationalist movement to dehumanize immigrants and inflame racial tensions has become a defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party’s brand.
Trump has stirred supporters at rallies by reading “The Snake,”a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake but is later killed when the revived creature bites her. It should be heard as a metaphor for immigration, he says.
The president referred to some African nations as “shithole countries.” He posited that “both sides” were to blame for last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And, again and again, he has accused black football players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police discrimination of being un-American.
It’s not easy to avoid the feeling that we are near the tipping point. I could well be irrationally exuberant, as I have thought this many times in the last year and a half, but shit is piling up on Trump at an exponential rate.
It is hard to overstate the enormity of Trump’s racism. He is well past being a crypto-Nazi and is now in the loud-and-proud Nazi mode. Mike Godwin, of the famous Godwin’s Law, has released the world to make the analogy in a tweet: “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.”.
The kiddie concentration camps are just the latest manifestation. Trump sorta-backed off from continuing his racial cleansing, but there are some ominous hints of bad things happening to the already-separated families. Several issues don’t add up to a good feeling:
• Trump didn’t make his capitulation retroactive. Why would he not do so? Do you suspect that the returning kids might have some tales to tell?
• CBP, HHS, and ICE claim to have lost track of the separated kids and have no way to match them up with their parents. Is this even remotely plausible? Apart from some vaguely worded argle-bargle about “Tender-Age Shelters” the US government, official enforcer of the land of the free and the home of the brave, has, in the grand tradition of dictators everywhere, “disappeared” these children.
• Is there any doubt that we will be getting reports of dead babies and molested children soon? Are there any external observers being allowed to monitor the incarceration conditions? Why all the secrecy? The silence is ominous.
This has been a desperation move to distract from Trump’s continuing difficulties. His campaign manager is just finishing up his first week in jail, and his fixer, Cohen, has flipped. Giuliani is flapping both his arms and his tongue trying to distract us from the looming problems Rudy has with the justice department’s IG investigation of his collusion with FBI agents from NY to sabotage the Hildebeest’s campaign. Trump sure seems to employ a lot of shady lawyers. And not very good ones, either. Giuliani has been a disaster for Trump. Every time he opens his mouth, he incriminates Trump some more.
And the American National Socialist Party, aka Republicans, continue to enable every racist dream of Trump. They could reign-in Trump, but decline to do so. The Wisco-Kid and McConnell could fix this in a day, but they won’t. The conventional wisdom is that they are scared of the even-more-hard right running them out of town. It goes deeper than that, though. 80% of their voters approve of Trump and a majority even like his concentration camps. This is not so much a failure of leadership as it is the conversion of the whole Republican party to Aryan goose-steppers.
This will be an epic election. The Republican party, led by Trump, has forced a fundamental choice on the electorate the likes of which has not happened in our lifetime. Where will we be on November 7??
Thompson was right, wasn’t he? There’s an odd aspect to this time, that you note. Those of us who have been opposed to Trump from the beginning want this to end, but we’ve seen him hold on before. We wonder: when will this end?
His much vaunted base is simply a modern-day Bund. Go they must, but they’ll not go on the basis of seeing to reason, fairness, or compassion. They’ll go when their leaders are ruined.
My paternal grandfather was a critic of the Bund, of their ideology and their growth in several cities of his time. He did not, sadly, live to see their ruin, and the ruin of the dictatorship they admired. Had he lived only a few years longer, he would have felt, I think, as we feel in our time, that the price of victory against them was necessary yet agonizingly high.
Never could he have imagined that America would see a second scourge of this kind, only eighty years later.
Good for a release concerning Godwin’s law. We should call a thing what it is.
That’s a painful but key point about these children – some may have dark (or darker) accounts than we can imagine now. All of this is on Trump’s head. All of it.
Sessions, of a neo-Confederate ideology and Confederate theology, is no less vile than Trump. A small backbencher, mostly ignored, saw his chance with the Trump campaign. One can see why Trump dislikes him on the Russian matter, but otherwise? Sessions is a bigot’s dream date. His distortions of theology are exceeded only by his contempt for non-white Americans.
Manafort’s fate should be a cautionary tale for Cohen, and both men would save at least a few years of their disreputable lives by relating Trump’s connections to Russia.
The NRA as a Russian cut-out: spot on. The organization is now a magnet for fellow travelers, and its own work constitutes, effectively, a fifth column against a democratic America.
In November, vast millions of our fellow citizens will be able to say we stood at the ballot box in opposition to Trump. There’s much to do before then, but to say that one stood opposed is, and will always be, a worthy act.
Something from Adam Serwer I’ve read, and will post tomorrow: Trumpism, Realized
(“To preserve the political and cultural preeminence of white Americans against a tide of demographic change, the administration has settled on a policy of systemic child abuse”).
One wishes one could disagree, but one cannot do so honestly.