I.C.E. To Migrants: Get Out, With Or Without Your Children

Want to see evil, in black and white, being perpetrated by the neo- fascist regime of Donald "Rump" Trump, on the eve of our Independence Day, no less?

Here's the form (in English only!) that I.C.E. is using to give parents who've been separated from their children at the border a choice. In the form's boxes, the only two choices are,

"I am requesting to reunite with my children for the purpose of repatriation to my country of citizenship."  

and

"I am affirmatively, knowingly, and voluntarily requesting to return to my country of citizenship without my minor children who I understand will remain in the United States to pursue available claims of relief."

Under the "zero tolerance" policy of the Rump regime, there is no option for families to be reunited and remain here while awaiting a decision on asylum claims. 

Just when you think they can't go any lower ...

(click on image to enlarge)

Cold As I.C.E. (UPDATED)

We've watched for some time the Trump regime's viciously inhumane practice of separating children from their parents when they cross the border seeking asylum.  Amid all the other outrages happening every day in this country, this is perhaps the most heart- breaking, but one to which we seem to have become numb, even as it violates every moral and ethical precept we're supposed to believe in as a country.  It's somewhat quaint at this point to imagine that we'll ever have the authority as a nation to speak in those terms again after this ugly nativist id -- manifested in the demagogue- in- chief -- is finally over.

The stark reality is that children as young as 18 months old are being separated from their parents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) agents. Of course, the intent by this "pro- life" regime is to discourage immigrants from attempting to seek asylum in the U.S. with the threat of breaking up their families.  The perversity of this policy, as well as its many unintended consequences, is demonstrated by Vice's Meredith Hoffman:

“Why do I have to leave? Mami I want to stay with you!” one four-year-old El Salvadorian boy balled to his mother, known as JIL, as CBP officers took him and his ten-year-old brother away from her in South Texas, according to an affidavit filed by the mother. They were separated in March—before Sessions’s policy even officially launched—but the incident is an example of what is now common practice at the border. The brothers slept in the same room as their mother back in El Salvador and were too anxious to go to the bathroom without her after witnessing MS-13 gang members beat and threaten her. But once they arrived in the US, the boys were placed in two separate foster homes and held in government custody for over a month without being able to speak with their mother, who remains in Laredo Detention Center, JIL’s attorney Denise Gilman told me. 

The boys are now staying with other family in Virginia, but JIL will likely be detained for many more months: A San Antonio judge Wednesday issued her a bond too high for her to pay—$12,500—deeming her a flight risk for being connected to a gang, when her sole connection was the harm they did her.  (our emphasis)

Please read her entire piece to get a better picture of what a shitshow this regime and its over-eager I.C.E. thugs have made of immigration policy and our image as a nation.

An further Orwellian touch was added this week, demonstrating that the Trump regime's inhumanity is perhaps exceeded only by its incompetence:

A top official with the Department of Health and Human Services told members of Congress on Thursday that the agency had lost track of nearly 1,500 migrant children it placed with sponsors in the United States, raising concerns they could end up in the hands of human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives. [snip] 

The children were taken into government care after they showed up alone at the Southwest border. Most of the children are from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, and were fleeing drug cartels, gang violence and domestic abuse, government data shows.  (our emphasis)

This is what happens when you consider these people to be "animals," as the black hole at the center of our government has called them (and don't give us any shit about who he was referring to; it's a feature for him, not a bug).  Imagine the terror these children are experiencing, having fled their country's violence, only to be treated like "animals" upon arriving at the border, being separated from their parents for no other reason than to deter others from coming north.

These reactions pretty well sum things up:

I am reading these first-hand accounts of mothers who had their children taken from them, with no word of where they were going or how to contact them, and I'm thinking about someone doing that to me and my kids and I feel a rage so powerful I think I'm gonna pass out.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 25, 2018

It isn’t easy for a man to rip a screaming child away from his mother. Most of us couldn’t do it. This is where “animals” comes in. Declare he isn’t really a child, she isn’t a woman. Now it’s like pulling a piglet from a sow. This has always been how states enable savagery.

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) May 26, 2018

Every time I read one of these stories about the thousands of families ICE has ripped apart, sometimes forever, I think about all the rich white people who will come out of the Trump administration saying & believing it honestly wasn’t that bad https://t.co/PKbfKTXzpy

— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) May 25, 2018

(h/t LGM)

UPDATE:  The Border Patrol also has ways of treating "animals"--

SHE HAS A NAME: unarmed 20 year old, Claudia Patricia Gómez González, from Guatemala, was shot and killed by an ICE agent on Wednesday near Laredo, Texas. pic.twitter.com/mNTgaomOvD

— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) May 25, 2018

UPDATE II:  Of course, the pathological sociopath is trying to blame ... Democrats.

(Photo:  no sign of heartbeats there)

Today's Tomorrow Cartoon

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(Tom Tomorrow, via Daily Kos)

Today's Dispatches From The Republican War On Latinos

Pursuing their campaign to "Make America Great White Again," the regime of white nationalist Donald "Rump" Trump together with his sycophantic toadies throughout the Republican Party are adopting policies of malignant neglect (Puerto Rico) and malignant hostility (brutal ICE tactics) that would never be visited upon non- Latino populations. You don't need to be an acute observer to notice what's gone on since January 20.

Puerto Rico

As we noted last Monday, the human suffering following Hurricane Maria 90 days ago continues to afflict our American brothers and sisters in Puerto Rico. Dana Milbank summarizes the current state of the island:

... Some 1,065 more Puerto Ricans died in September and October of this year than in previous years, almost certainly storm-related deaths, according to the Center for Investigative Journalism. When all is tallied, the destruction in Puerto Rico will be very much on par with what Trump considers “a real catastrophe like Katrina,” which killed about 1,800. 

Incredibly, a large portion of the island remains without power — three months after the storm. It was reported this week that power may not be fully restored until May. Puerto Ricans — American citizens — are still awaiting tarps and temporary roofs to shelter them after an untold number of homes were destroyed. 

A new report from Refugees International said, “Thousands of people still lack sustainable access to potable water and electricity and dry, safe places to sleep.” The group faulted the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s “bureaucratic and opaque assistance process” for leaving survivors with “enormous challenges.” [snip] 

In October, when Trump was tossing “beautiful, soft” rolls of paper towels at Puerto Ricans, he offered lavish promises of aid and said Wall Street lenders were “going to say goodbye” to Puerto Rico’s $72 billion debt. But the debt was not written off, and disaster-relief aid has been inadequate and piecemeal. Now, Trump and congressional Republicans are hitting Puerto Rico with an additional, man-made catastrophe. 

The GOP tax bill, which Trump celebrated this week, treats Puerto Rico as a foreign country, imposing a 12.5 percent tax on the income companies there receive from intellectual property — a big hit to its crucial pharmaceutical and medical-device sector. Rather than give Puerto Rico special tax treatment, which it urgently needs, Trump and his congressional allies gave employers a powerful reason to move jobs off the island. (our emphasis)

Dreamers

The future of the Obama- era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Dreamers) program is in limbo following failure by timid, spineless Democrats to use their leverage to include a fix in the recent continuing resolution. (If Democrats can find a way to de- energize-- if not screw-- their base, they'll sure try.) They can try again when the current continuing resolution expires, or they can finally push to get action on the DREAM Act to create long- term stability for 700,000 Dreamers. (If Democrats don't step up to the plate, they'll rightly be seen as occupying the same moral swamp on this issue as Republicans.)

Nevertheless, Republicans created this mess when Rump had Confederate States Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III cancel the Dreamers program in September.  Now Republicans are caught between their anti- immigrant, frothing base and their desire to save the necks of members running in swing districts. As Jonathan Blitzer reports:

... To minimize the political fallout from the cancellation, Trump called on lawmakers to pass legislation to restore the protections he had just ended. He set a deadline of March 5th for Congress to act. “Trump created this crisis, set a date to push recipients off of a cliff, and then left it to Congress to prevent it,” Cecilia Muñoz, a former Obama official who helped develop the DACA policy, told me. [snip]

Trump’s DACA deadline coincides with congressional primary season. Many incumbent Republicans will need to shore up their bases of support on the right, and others will be facing Steve Bannon-inspired conservative challengers; they won’t want to appear too conciliatory on a contentious issue like immigration. 

ICE 

Living up to their acronym under the racist Rump regime, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Homeland Security is considering pursuing a heartless strategy to discourage families with children from seeking refuge in the United States:

FAMILIES AND unaccompanied children detained at the Mexican border are often fleeing horrific conditions in Central American countries, especially El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where violent gangs, drug trafficking and rampant criminality contribute to some of the world’s highest murder rates. Now the Trump administration, alarmed at the recent surge in border crossers, is considering a new strategy to deter them. The message: “You think your native country is cruel? America is even crueller.” [snip] 

That’s the logic behind a proposal under consideration by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen that would try to discourage migrant families from crossing the border by threatening to separate parents from their children when they are taken into custody in the United States. 

If Ms. Nielsen gives the green light to break up migrant families, many of whom have plausible asylum claims, she would be responsible for a policy whose heartlessness would rival that of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forcible internment of some 110,000 U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Four decades after that act of mass inhumanity, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation formally apologizing for it.

That's, of course, when ICE agents aren't

... stalking a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy’s ambulance and staking out her hospital room, classifying any person caught in an ICE raid as a “criminal” and [...] attempting to deport a journalist back to a country where he faced death at the hands of the drug cartels he’d exposed.

If you feel like you're living in a different country than you were 12 months ago, you're not alone.