Last Friday, the President visited Calexico, California, where he said, "We're full, our system's full, our country's full -- can't come in! Our country is full, what can you do? We can't handle any more, our country is full. Can't come in, I'm sorry. It's very simple."
Behind the scenes, two sources told CNN, the President told border agents to not let migrants in. Tell them we don't have the capacity, he said. If judges give you trouble, say, "Sorry, judge, I can't do it. We don't have the room."
After the President left the room, agents sought further advice from their leaders, who told them they were not giving them that direction and if they did what the President said they would take on personal liability. You have to follow the law, they were told...
trump was essentially telling border agents to lie to judges and ignore court orders... telling them to ignore the legal system that's supposed to maintain order across our nation. The supervisory agents may have tried to walk back what trump said, but trump's ranted about doing this for a good while... it's just now he's directly telling federal officers to break the law (and he's going to expect them to do that).
Never mind the fact trump is lying about the country being full. It's not like we're packed shoulder to shoulder. And like I've said before, if a boatload of Norwegians showed up trump would gladly welcome them and send them to emptied Red States where there's maybe three people every fifty miles. I could bore you with employment reports suggesting we need more workers in various industries, but trump would ignore those truths and stick to his desire to ban every Latino from our land.
There's a moment in storytelling called the Moral Event Horizon, when a character takes a plunge into the deep end of the Dark Side and never looks back. trump has always been a walking disaster, a monster roaming the countryside, but there were still constraints and forces that were holding him back from acts of barbarity that could doom us all.
trump is finally cutting every last restraint. Half of Homeland Security is run by "acting" department heads, likely doing jobs without official approval (to make it easier to avoid accountability later). Nearly every agency across government is understaffed and bleeding workers, making it hard to get things done by the book (if at all). he's positioning himself to issue direct commands, and everyone taking his orders getting prepped to break every last shred of legal checks and balances.
I've been doomsaying this for the last three years, I know. It's been bad news leading into worse news day after day, and every dark sin becomes "normalized" before we even realize the damage done. And yet we keep on treading water...
But now it all feels more dangerous than ever before. trump is ready to cross a line about the immigration crisis (most of which he's exacerbated anyway). I'm talking about a line where not only will our government break its own laws... a lot of people are going to get hurt and killed - intentionally - in the process.
This is the moment where I am genuinely convinced we are going to get bloodshed. Open acts of violence and repression. Something we haven't really seen on a grand scale since the 1960s.
I am straight up afraid for my country tonight. What the hell is going to happen to us...
1 comment:
I've been trying to tell the anti-immigrant trolls for a while that, by their own numbers (the ones supposedly propping up their tax cut bill) we need more immigration.
I, and everyone else except the marks in the Republican voting base know that the failure of their growth estimates is deliberate, to be used as a pretext for dismantling the new deal and great society, but the numbers are theirs and there's no arguing with what they say.
But then again there's no arguing with the anti-immigrant trolls, either. They simply disregard everything I say and spout the propaganda they consume at me, even though most of them have never met an immigrant and I live in a community chock-full of them.
I believe there is a reckoning approaching, and a lot is riding on its outcome, but I also feel like there are forces resisting it that are powerful enough to slow it down.
Perhaps there are 30% of the electorate who won't defend the concept of objective reality, and in doing so help enable their ugly, orange champion in his corrupt and deadly dance with fascism, but their very rejection of objective reality puts them at a disadvantage they can't even know about, and that's where we need to marshal our forces in our attempt to stop the damage they are trying to do.
I don't know if it will work, but at least it's something.
-Doug in Oakland
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