In immigration policy, lawlessness starts with the Trump administration

The Trump administration has been ignoring the Flores Agreement for a very long time now, which had stipulated that migrant children were to be provided with humane living conditions and not held more than 20 days in de facto concentration camps. But while there have been many “outcries” in response, nothing has changed; Trump, Stephen Miller and Ken Cuccinelli continue to defy the “law” they claim to be upholding. It wasn’t until March 27 that the ICE—in response to a letter of complaint from Rep. Jerry Nadler—even bothered to distribute adequate hand sanitizers and just plain soap to the nearly 40,000 immigrants held in its detention centers. Oh and by the way,  in William Barr’s new policy of releasing prisoners who pass an “algorithm” test that can be “gamed” to release only white white-color criminals, only inmates convicted of violent and sexual crimes, and those who are detained for immigration-related offenses, are not eligible for early release. That’s right: undocumented workers rounded-up at a poultry plant or in a strawberry field are just as “dangerous” as native-born murderers and  rapists, according to the Trump administration.  

Meanwhile, to add on to the Trump administration’s continuing record of law-breaking—which includes the “remain in Mexico” policy and the outrageously disingenuous “safe third-party” policy which makes it impossible for Central American migrants to make asylum claims in this country—border agents are now using the coronavirus as an excuse to implement a new policy: to detain all migrants on their way to a border station to apply for asylum before they actually reach them to do so, and on an average of 96 minutes have them back across the border after insuring that they are duly noted as “criminals” for just crossing the border. It is a matter of little question that the Trump administration will continue this policy as long as they are allowed to get away with it long after the virus danger recedes.

Reports are that 15 percent of border crossers are allowed to remain in the U.S. to apply for asylum. Who are they? Mostly Indian (nearly 10,000 were detained crossing the southern border in 2018) and Chinese. For them, because they are the “favored” ones it is back to “catch and release.” One-in-six persons from Asia and India are in the country illegally, but according to ICE’s website, they claim not to have sufficient “resources" to spend their time tracking down non-Hispanic illegal immigrants, particularly "low priority" Asian immigrants with expired visas--such as the illegal immigrant who raped and murdered a 92-year-old Hispanic woman recently. 

Some people may still cling to the idea of the “letter” of the law, but there is also the law of simple human decency. We all know that Trump and Stephen Miller are racists, and that they simply hate Hispanics. We know all about the Miller emails (and he still has a job), and Trump jumpstarted his presidential campaign by claiming that except for a “few” who maybe might be “good people,” Hispanic immigrants were all rapists and murderers. The ICE, which has devolved into a thug organization, recently released its 2019 report of the crimes allegedly committed by immigrants it detained, or had been arrested for by local authorities but not convicted for; the report did not breakdown by “ethnicity” or race (so that people would assume that they were all Hispanic; one-quarter of illegal immigrants are non-Hispanic), but it did breakdown by type of crime—and only 10 percent of those arrested by the ICE who had committed actual crimes had engaged in what could legitimately be called violent crimes, and most of those for various forms of “assault.” Even the numbers provided were subject to question, since the people the ICE arrested were those who had been released after serving prison terms; they did not refer to crimes that had actually been committed in 2019, but anti-Hispanic immigrant types “interpreted” them for that purpose anyways.

But in the Trump administration, crime starts at the top, and “trickles-down” from there. A month ago U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss issued a ruling stating that the Trump administration violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act when Cuccinelli was installed as head of the ICE. Moss found that the administration had invented a phony position for Cuccinelli, and that the then “acting” head of the DHS, Kevin McAleenan, followed orders (most likely from Miller) to illegally “appoint” Cuccinelli as his “first assistant” ahead of the deputy DHS director, who was actually the “first assistant” by law. Because he was unlawfully in his position, Moss invalidated two of Cuccinelli’s directives. One of them allowed only a maximum of “one calendar day” for an asylum seeker to have a “credible fear” interview; thus if an asylum seeker showed up at 6 PM at a border station, they just had 6 hours to “prove” their case, if border agents even bothered to allow them the opportunity. The second directive denied asylum officers from granting extensions for that time period “except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” which of course is subject to “interpretation.” Both directives remain in effect.

These outrageous, unlawful directives have been denounced by immigrant advocates, but the media, lawmakers and the public in general don’t really see these migrants as human beings, just numbers and figures; they are from “shithole” countries anyways, “right”? 800 million Indians live in “shithole” conditions, more than in Latin America and sub-Sahara Africa combined, but in this country it is assumed that they are all “high-skill” workers, ignoring the impact of caste and “ethnic” prejudice and discrimination there—and here. According to the Wall Street Journal, contrary to racist myth, 4.4 million illegal immigrants pay federal taxes according to the IRS, and they are not eligible for any federal benefits derived from it, including the stimulus check--and the $500 per child even if their children are U.S. citizens. Nor has anyone called into question the way the judge’s ruling has been ignored not just in the Cuccinelli case but in the way the Trump administration has ignored the rulings of many others. Cuccinelli, of course, is not going anywhere, which only underlines the lawlessness of this administration.

Truman had a sign on his desk: "The Buck Stops Here." Trump has one on his desk: "The Buck Passes Here."

I know, Trump fanatics and others sucked into the far-right black hole, Chuck Todd said something very disturbing to your tender sensitivities: that because of his gross mishandling of the coronavirus problem, Donald Trump has “blood on his hands.” It is too much to ask for you people to actually think about what he said, and why he would even say such a thing; but then again, for you people Trump can do no wrong, because doing what is wrong on a moral and ethical level is always “acceptable” and “justifiable” if only it is directly opposed to simple human logic or decency. And naturally your favorite forum for alternate “facts,” Fox News, is back to its old tricks of defending Trump and treating the pandemic like it is something the “liberals” cooked-up to annoy him personally and hurt his reelection chances—and this after Trish Regan was kind-of-officially “fired” from her job, but finding her not too unhappy about it, apparently because she probably received another golden parachute divorce settlement like she most likely received from the other networks that gave her the boot. 

The Guardian, meanwhile, notes that during the “lost six weeks” when the Trump administration dithered, South Korea—which had its first confirmed case of the virus at around the same time it appeared in the U.S.—saw its government step-in immediately to thwart a wholesale spread of the virus, and has for the most part been successful in that endeavor. On the other hand, with the willing and eager aid of the sycophantic Fox News, Trump for six weeks did almost nothing save shut down travel from China and Europe, and then claim all was going to be just “great” and “no big deal.” Repeatedly he referred to his own gross underestimation of the problem, several times claiming that within days the virus would be completely eradicated in the U.S. In fact the opposite has occurred: last week, the U.S. moved ahead of China and Italy for the most cases of the virus; as of today, the number of cases has gone up fifty percent from that number, with no ceiling in sight, and more than 2,000 have died and counting. 

It was further revealed that in 2016 the NSC had produced a “playbook” on how to systematically deal with a pandemic that Trump officials ignored; when an inquiry was made in regard to this subject, it was claimed that it was “out-of-date.” Well, it seems that the alleged “up-to-date” guidance Trump officials claim to be using isn’t working very well, is it? But such is the fact that the Trump administration has systematically chased off experienced people with the requisite know-how, either not replaced, or replaced with political sycophants or people who otherwise don’t have clue one of what they are doing, such as Mike Pence and Jared Kushner.

Meanwhile, what is going on out in the country? From what I can tell, not everyone is treating the coronavirus situation the same way. Individually, most people know that they will not catch the virus during that millisecond that they pass each other on the sidewalk, but there are always those for whom there is a thin-line between “safe” and stupid. Some people would prefer to walk in the middle of the street if they see someone else passing them on the sidewalk. I saw a woman trying to turn the handle of a restroom door with her wrists, and not too successfully. I saw a man with toilet paper stuffed-up his nostrils; he could have just as easily stuffed the chunks of hotdog bun falling out his mouth for the same purpose.

In Seattle—or at least in downtown Seattle, they have taken the governor’s lockdown order seriously enough; at least the office building I work in is now locked-down 24/7.  Down “south” in Kent, maybe things are not quite as serious. Sure, the city parks (or at least that is what they are called) have been “shutdown,” although that seems to be just a move to chase away the principle users of the parks, homeless people—which of course brings-up the issue that hasn’t received much attention in the national media, how homeless people are handling the situation, particularly if they have to share crowded and largely unsanitary conditions, even in shelters.

Anyways, the major fast food chains in Kent’s are now closed for even take-outs, only allowing drive-through orders. But one does wonder about where all those cars came from that fill the industrial and office parks along 68^th Ave on weekdays, and some on Saturday; it seems to me that for most businesses (or at least small business) in Kent it remains “business as usual”—until someone tells them otherwise. Is this the reason why the city council is so fearful of the Econolodge being converted by the county into a coronavirus quarantine location?

In the meantime, if things get any worse (and there is no indication that things are getting “better”), someone is going to have to “own” the situation. President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk: “The Buck Stops Here.” Trump should have a sign on his desk saying “The Buck Passes Here.” It passed for six critical weeks when the coronavirus problem could have been corralled. Trump has been passing blame on Barack Obama, but the 2009 H1N1 epidemic did not result in the serious economic impacts that the coronavirus is having. We saw a record 3.3 million people apply for unemployment insurance last week—four times the previous high, which occurred during the Reagan administration. That is largely the fault of Trump’s failure to act. I was working at SeaTac Airport in 2009; I don’t remember the airport shutting down like it is now. Why? Because the Obama administration acted in coordination with the WHO, not with Fox News. 

The history books will record the failures and inactions of the Trump administration; there is no escaping the truth.

Biden must find a way to avoid turning himself into a clown show if he is going to beat Trump

Donald Trump apparently continues to con a majority of Americans into believing that he has the country’s coronavirus predicament well in hand, even though he himself clearly has no clue himself of what exactly is going on. For once I agree with Hillary Clinton on something—he is no “doctor,” and people should be taking his claims that everything will be just “great” by Easter with all the seriousness we would give to an alchemist trying to convert a pile of manure into gold, or an astrologer working from a sky chart taken on a cloudy night. Note that Trump spends very little time during his press “updates” providing useful information in regard to the coronavirus problem; instead, he treats it as a major annoyance that the “fake news” media is trying to destroy him with—which, by the way, is what Fox News is back to doing again. 

Trump’s overuse of superlatives only reflects his diminishing ability to think in logical terms, or find appropriate words or thoughts that establish why he would think that everything is “great” when they are not. We are supposed to believe that everything is “great” just because Trump says it is? Is a majority of the country actually “crazy” for believing that he is actually “in control” of the situation? When there are reports that administration officials ignored a “playbook” which offered guidelines on what do during a pandemic? A man who has been using the distribution of needed supplies as a political weapon against those who have criticized the failures of the administration to offer leadership that actually is of substance and not mere rhetoric? A man who just claimed “victory” over the virus on a day that 129 Americans died of it?  A record 3.3 million apply for unemployment insurance in one week? No big deal. The U.S. passes China and Italy for the most virus cases? What was that? What about that AOC virus thing?

So who is coming to “rescue” us in the 2020 election? Joe Biden?  Biden finally came out of hiding this week, and one wonders what the heck he had been doing, because it apparently wasn’t spending a lot of time studying and making sure he had everything straight in his mind. If you listen to Fox News (which a majority of cable news watchers do), his media blitz on Trump’s “leadership” on the coronavirus problem did, to put it mildly,  more-or-less confirm fears about the current state of his mind. He did practically everything wrong—not covering his cough “correctly,” constantly touching his face, unable to carry on a subject after the teleprompter malfunctioned, mispronouncing one-syllable words, losing his train of thought, making silly criticisms of Trump that made no sense. According to Brit Hume, "like so many people his age, (Biden) is losing his memory and is getting senile. I don't think there's any doubt about this. I have traces of this myself. I know what it feels like. Sometimes you're confused, sometimes you can't remember, 'What are you supposed to do the next morning?'—and I'm not running for president and it's probably a good thing I'm not." 

Look, Sanders supporters told you about this, and you didn’t listen. Now what? Biden needs to either get with his doctor pronto and work with him on ingesting some memory-improving vitamin supplements, or keep his media commentaries to sound-bite level. That’s not necessarily a “losing” strategy—I mean, look at Trump, or Ronald Reagan. Back in 1984 during his summation in his first debate with Walter Mondale, Reagan seemed hopelessly lost and confused, particularly when trying to recall numbers and statistics. In the next debates, Reagan dispensed with facts and figures, keeping to what he regarded as “common sense” views on policy. That’s not necessarily a “loser” if your opponent has trouble making sense even under the best of circumstances. While it was clear that Biden appeared to be of sound mind during the last debate, probably due to extensive preparation, an unprepared Biden sets himself up as an embarrassing clown show. I take no pleasure in saying that, since we already have someone in office who wouldn’t know a fact if it hit him in the face. 

We would hope that Biden at this point is sure of himself enough that he knows what he wants to accomplish, if that means spending some quiet time studying, which obviously Trump does not like to do. We know that Trump has difficulty absorbing more than one idea at a time; during policy briefings, aides have to keep hammering home one point until he “gets it.” Trump has allowed inhuman people like Stephen Miller to take charge of domestic policy, someone like Mike Pompeo who thinks everything is a “joke” take control of foreign policy, and William Barr to style himself as Heinrich Himmler. I don’t believe that anyone thinks that Biden is incapable, and that he will surround himself with humane people to formulate policy. We should not fear that he is at a stage that CBS News’ Lesley Stahl described Reagan during an encounter in the White House in 1986. Told not to ask him any questions, she found him 

…as shriveled as a kumquat. He was so frail, his skin so paper-thin. I could almost see the sunlight through the back of his withered neck…His eyes were coated. Larry introduced us, but he had to shout. Had Reagan turned off his hearing aid?…Reagan didn’t seem to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my hand weakly. Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet. My heart began to hammer with the import…I was aware of the delicacy with which I would have to write my script. But I was quite sure of my diagnosis.

Stahl decided not to make this observation public until in a book that was published after Reagan passed away. The question for us now is that we will likely be presented with two candidates, one whose inability to digest factual information leads him to reject such information in favor of whatever ill-defined nonsense that he believes will put him in the best possible light regardless of consequences, or someone who is not as “quick” of mind as he used to be, which makes his proneness to gaffe-making more subject to inquiry in regard to his mental state, but who we also know is guided by simple human decency and true American values, which the Trump administration lacks in abundance.

For one "expert" in gender victimology, not nominating Elizabeth Warren will "cost us our lives"

You’d never know it these days, but Joe Biden is the odds-on favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. If you hit the Google app on your phone and the “latest headlines” appear; it seems that half the time there is something about Elizabeth Warren, usually her making some noise about the current state of the nation. She may no longer be in the running for president, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t still “campaigning,” or that the media is campaigning for her as a vice presidential candidate, or that it is simply because the fake-progressive media can’t let go of the fact that most voters saw her in a much less pristine light than they did. All her lies and mistruths only made her many policy announcements more propaganda than anything believable.

Would some of us like a progressive” as vice president to talk in Biden’s ear? Very much. Would Warren be a “good” VP in that light? No. It would have to be a person who Biden considers to be a friend, not someone who is not only not a friend, but someone who would present a constant thorn in his side who he would simply ignore. Bernie Sanders may not be in the running, but at least he and Biden are friends, and Biden might actually listen to someone like that. On the other hand, Biden and Warren are not friends, and Biden would know that Warren would attempt to undermine him at every opportunity, because she would simply be using the post as a platform for a 2024 presidential campaign. Furthermore, it would be very likely that Warren would repel more voters than she would attract, because unlike Sanders she doesn’t make people who disagree with her feel like they are being called ignorant, sexist assholes. 

I would much prefer to give discussions of this sort a rest because it isn’t pertinent to what is going on in the country today, but then I am confronted with more self-serving nonsense, and then I am off to the races. Take for instance the following headline in a current op-ed in The Hill: “Gendered disinformation might have cost Warren the nomination and us our lives”—or so claims Lucina Di Meco, a self-styled “expert” in gender discrimination. This is the kind of self-serving claim that white feminists typically make that causes most people to wince in disgust. Di Meco’s op-ed generally failed to make her case to anyone but the true believers, with her claim based on cherry-picked social media bytes and deliberately skewed “studies” by interested parties; believe me, there is tons of pro-Warren social media that is just as offensive to ones’ common sense. In the commentary section, Di Meco’s defenders seemed to believe that just by disagreeing with her assessments was proof enough of “misogyny.” 

Some doubters pointed out some obvious pitfalls in both Hillary Clinton’s and Warren’s campaigns, the kind that Barack Obama had avoided to his credit and helped him win. Obama went out of his way not make his “race” an issue in the campaign; he didn’t have to make it one, because he had the black vote in the bag, and he was free to pursue the white vote. On the other hand, Clinton and Warren didn’t feel they had the white female vote “in the bag” enough. They couldn’t accept the fact that many white women were just as bigoted and paranoid as their white men, and so they “worked” the gender angle to the point where they were ignoring or alienating the voters who might actually have been more able to satisfy their megalomaniacal opportunism. 

And of course there was all that pathological lying and disingenuousness about campaign finance (receiving millions of dollars from a PAC whose very intent was female-only support isn’t “sexist”), and the fact that Warren was viewed by most minorities as an elitist, privileged, “entitled” white candidate who was the “elitist” white media favorite. The only thing that had to with “gender” was with Warren’s abject failure to understand that today it is synonymous in a political context with a cheap attack that the media might gobble-up, but many voters see as a Hail Mary pass in the last seconds of a losing contest. Why is being disingenuousness and dealing in falsehoods more acceptable coming from a female? I have news for Warren diehards: it isn’t. 

Goddam—do we have to keep repeating the obvious truth ad nauseam? Of course we do in this “feeling good about feeling bad” world we are forced to live in, where a certain class of privileged "victims" don't actually want to "fix"  the problems, because then they'd have fewer reasons to claim that they are "victims" and employ rationalizations to dehumanize the "enemy." What these people should be doing is finding a way to reduce that 53 percent number--and realize that they need a different "strategy" than they one  they used in 2016, because it didn't work for Warren in 2020 either. That means first realizing that the "enemy" is really "us."

Self-deluding fanatics like Di Meco  actually exist on the fringes of society, but they have an out-sized presence in the superstars-in-their-own-minds realm of the media--unlike, say, Hispanics who are virtually nonexistent in the mainstream media despite the fact that there are at least 47 million Hispanics who are U.S. citizens, thus more likely to be talked about than being allowed to set the story "straight." Seattle is supposed to be a “progressive” mecca. Is it? No, it is full of self-involved narcissists, and a great many of them are women who are guided by their prejudices and stereotypes. What is like to be a male in Seattle? Actually, the better question is what it is like to be judged a Hispanic male who is stereotyped as being overly “macho” and "sex-obsessed" over white females. I was standing in line at a Dick’s hamburger shack in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. There was just one line because there were far fewer people than usual because of this virus thing. One of the persons taking orders was a white male, the middle line that people had decided to stand in until the other window became free, where a white female was taking orders. When she saw that I was the next person to go to her window, she slammed her window shut and walked to the back of the shack, and took her sweet time coming back; she apparently expected that I would be being served by the other person by the time she came back, but I was still there, waiting. 

But instead of looking at me to tell me she was ready to take my order, she looked right past me to another person, asking in a loud, over-friendly tone “Are you ready?” as if to make sure that person responded more quickly than I did over the deliberate slight. Obviously angered by being ignored, I advanced toward the window announcing that “Yeah, I’m ready.” With that phoniness I see so often in fake “liberals” in this city, she said “Oh!” and tried to fake-off her deliberate “mistake” with patronizing “good cheer.” When she handed me my order, I said, “Yeah, I know, I’m invisible,” and she pretended not to know what I was talking about. I told her that she knew exactly what I was talking about, and as I walked away I could hear her wailing away with the usual defensiveness of the guilty person.  

If women make such wonderful and humane “leaders,” more than males (given that there are plenty of stories concerning racist interactions between white women and minorities that suggest otherwise), I wondered how  Di Meco would explain "leaders" like former British prime minister Theresa May, who when she was Home Secretary instituted the ”hostile environment rule,” whose "aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants"--that resulted in the Windrush scandal, when de facto British citizens from the Caribbean when they immigrated from British-held islands were targeted because of their skin color, and illegally detained, denied human rights and health care, and many illegally deported. White women act on base prejudices just as any other people do, and the way they “positively” stereotype themselves as opposed to others is just as harmful as any other kind.