The Real Public Charges

The hardest-working and most economy-supporting people in this country have the lowest-paid jobs.  Those would be the jobs the rest of us literally can't live unless somebody else does them:  the lettuce-pickers and all the other food crop harvesters, the toilet cleaners and the garbage collectors, the diaper-changing, vomit-mopping-up caretakers of our infants and our elderly.

They are the ones who keep this country running.  They are the ones whose hard-earned taxes repugs are giving to the real public charges:  the oxygen-wasting idle rich.

One desperate guatemalan refugee cleaning hotel rooms while hiding from ICE does more real work in A SINGLE HOUR than Ivanka fucking Trump has done in her entire grifting, cheating, pissing-on-the-poor life.

Wonkette: 

One of Stephen Miller's top priorities for fucking over America's legal immigration system is finally about to take effect, assuming it survives the many lawsuits that will be thrown at it. The new rule would sharply restrict the ability of low-income people to get permanent residency or even temporary visas by screening out virtually all applicants who have ever used federal assistance like Medicaid, food stamps, or public housing. The rule will be published in the Federal Register Wednesday, and then go into effect in October, despite an overwhelming majority of public comments opposing the change.

 

The rules are an attempt to inject steroids into a relic of the Immigration Act of 1882, which prohibited immigration by anyone deemed likely to become a "public charge" -- that is, likely to become a burden to the taxpayer. That term was never explicitly defined by Congress, so Miller and his allies in the Trump administration decided it should be defined as restrictively as possible, to keep out anyone who's used any of a whole raft of public assistance programs for any amount of time.

Let's emphasize right up front that this is not about undocumented immigrants: This is an attempt to punish legal migrants who legally received benefits that Congress said they legally qualify for.

Just for shits and giggles, because reality doesn't exist in the Pumpkin Traitor's America, have some facts:

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

Like all of this president’s immigration policies, this one is based on lies. Here are the facts.

–  Legal Permanent Residents (LPR’s)–sometimes referred to as green card holders–do not have full access to all public benefit programs and are subject to limitations before being eligible for federal means-tested benefits…such limitations include the “five-year bar,” which requires the individual to have maintained LPR status in the U.S. for five years before being eligible for benefits…

– Legal immigrants use federal public benefit programs at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens…

– Both documented and undocumented immigrants pay more into public benefit programs than they take out ...

Not infuriated yet?  Have some Rude Pundit.

Why Immigrants From Shithole Countries Make the Best American Citizens

Via Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo, Rep. Ilhan Omar:

I started attending political caucuses with my grandfather, who cherished democracy as only someone who has experienced its absence could.

Go on, just try to read that out loud without choking up.  I dare ya.

Protecting Babies

Via Juanita Jean:

Meanwhile, Back at the Baby Jails

Everybody who thinks Rapey McLiarFace (stolen from Wonkette) has any more respect for brown babies than he does for white women, stand on your head.

Erik Loomis:

This nation is in a fight to the death over whether people of color will be treated with human rights. I don’t want a bipartisan solution to this, not that one was ever going to happen anyway. I want to crush conservatives’ belief that they can ethnically cleanse the nation. Abolish ICE is a good beginning.

And only electing Democratic candidates to take over Congress is going to do it.  

31 Days. How many Democratic voters are you sending to the polls?

Normalizing Crimes Against Humanity

These people are not bumbling goofs to laugh at.  They're not political incompetents in need of adult supervision.  They're not even anti-government idiots determined to burn the house down around themselves.

They are war criminals, turning their sick fantasies into atrocities.

Scott Lemieux concludes by quoting Paul Krugman:

No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred — who tries, for example, to turn it into a “both sides” story — is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity.

Fuck Civility

From Juanita Jean:

Because Sending Them to Their Deaths is the Goal

Scott Lemieux

Sending innocent people to their avoidable deaths to own the libs is Republican policy now.

And how perfectly it fits the hatred and fear-mongering that is all the rest of the racist, misogynistic, homophobic GOP.

President Boko Haram

From Noah at Down with Tyranny:

Of Course They're Raping the 4-Year-Old Girls; That's the Point

 It's a terror tactic and a war crime, and it's exactly what repugs want.

 

Down with Tyranny:

UPDATE: Who's Taking Care Of The Kidnapped Kids?

Guys like Deputy Sheriff Jose Nunez, a 10-year veteran of the Bexar County Sheriff's Department. According to the Dallas Morning News Nunez (not Devin Nunes this time) sexually assaulted a 4-year-old girl and threatened the victim's mother into staying quiet about the assaults.

Sheriff Javier Salazar said the girl had been assaulted multiple times over the course of several months. The mother is an undocumented immigrants and Nunez said she'd be deported if she told anyone.

Let's Blow Up Some Lies

And remember, these are lies that are literally killing people while also inuring us to the disappearance of the rule of law, and thus Democracy.

Actually, "lie" is the wrong word.  I use it because there is no word that accurately and adequately describes what they are doing.

Digby:

This Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick and Margo Schlanger rounds up some of the ways you can contribute volunteer or otherwise help:

First, the policy: It helps to be incredibly clear on what the law is, and what has and has not changed. When Donald Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that the policy of separating children from their parents upon entry is a law passed by Democrats that Democrats will not fix, they are lying.

There are two different policies in play, and both are new.

First is the new policy that any migrant family entering the U.S. without a border inspection will be prosecuted for this minor misdemeanor. The parents get incarcerated and that leaves children to be warehoused. The parents then typically plead guilty to the misdemeanor and are given a sentence of the few days they served waiting for trial. But then when the parents try to reunite with their children, they are given the runaround—and possibly even deported, alone. The children are left in HHS custody, often without family.

Second is a new and apparently unwritten policy that even when the family presents themselves at a border-entry location, seeking asylum—that is, even when the family is complying in all respects with immigration law—the government is snatching the children away from their parents. Here, the government’s excuse seems to be that they want to keep the parents in jaillike immigration detention for a long time, while their asylum cases are adjudicated. The long-standing civil rights case known as Flores dictates that they aren’t allowed to keep kids in that kind of detention, so the Trump administration says they have to break up the families. They do not have to break up families—it is the government’s new choice to jail people with credible asylum claims who haven’t violated any laws that is leading to the heartbreaking separations you’ve been reading about.

So that is what is happening. Whether or not that is what the Bible demands is the subject of a different column. Good explainers on what is and is not legal detention of immigrants and asylum-seekers can also be found here and here and here.

Next: Which groups to support.

This is not being done against the will of Trump voters.  This is what they were promised and what they demanded.  62 million Deplorables are responsible for this.  And proud of it.

Campaign of Terror

Digby:

But that isn't the only horror being inflicted on immigrants in this country.Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and the rest of the deplorable GOP are terrorizing the Latino community in order to rid this nation of --- Latinos. They are doing everything in their power to scare them into taking their families and leaving the country by going after mothers and babies, teen-agers brought by their parents and even legal residents who had a brush with the law decades ago.. I suspect they would prefer that Hispanic Americans follow:

SNIP

You can't beat the irony of ICE deporting someone who committed domestic violence 20 years ago in the same week that the ttorney general unilaterally ruled that women cannot seek asylum in the country if they are fleeing domestic violence. 

This is a campaign of terror being waged by the government against a specific community in the United States. There's no other way to describe it.

Deport All the White Immigrants First. That's All Y'All, Motherfuckers

And start with the ones whose pasty ancestors got here the earliest.

 

Charlie Pierce:

This is now clearly a war on all immigration, legal and otherwise. The history of this country would be immeasurably different—and immeasurably worse—if you eliminated from it all those people who came here fleeing violence and oppression. In fact, if you did that, you wouldn’t have a country here at all. Maybe we don’t any more.

Scary Lies to Keep You Afraid

This is really the kind of stupid shit that eight-year-olds tell their four-year-old siblings to keep them terrified and biddable.  We all grew out of it.  Except the toddler-in-chief and his repug enablers.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal:

So here’s what Trump doesn’t want you to know: rich white people were fine with bringing in immigrants from a country whose civil war was financed by the United States because they wanted “the help” to clean their toilets and tend their gardens. That was cool because the brown folks were cordoned off in areas with struggling schools and high crime rates.

Now Trump needs an issue to rile up his base and get them out to the polls in November. He wants them to equate undocumented immigrants with MS-13 gang members and be very, very afraid. Here are some numbers to keep in mind:

1. There are roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
2. According to the FBI, there are 8,000-10,000 MS-13 gang members in the country, but not all of them are undocumented.
3. Even if all MS-13 gang members were undocumented, they would represent less that .09 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country.

The truth is that I’m not actually an MS-13 lover. I support the efforts of law enforcement to hold those who have committed crimes accountable. But I also know a scam when I see one—especially when it has its roots in racism and fascism. Calling MS-13 gang members “animals” is the latest way that Trump is attempting to fear-monger support for his administration and for Republican candidates. It is an incredibly dangerous ploy that is aimed at turning this country into something many of us wouldn’t recognize as a democracy. So if standing up against that threat makes me an MS-13 lover in the minds of fascists, I say, “bring it on!”

Oh, no you don't. Not the top student at MY alma mater.

At 22, Omar Salinas Chacon has already accomplished more and overcome more racist, unAmerican obstacles than every fascist, torturing, Constitution-fucking ICE agent in the country put together.

That the trumpie stormtroopers would even think about deporting Salinas Chacon is a mountain of shame on us, the American citizens who are letting it happen.

From the Herald:

By any measure, Eastern Kentucky University senior Omar Salinas Chacon is a model student.

With a double major in political science and Spanish, a longtime member of student government and a captain of the mock trial team, Salinas Chacon recently was named “Student of the Year” by the National Collegiate Honors Council, the top prize in the nation for honors students. After graduation, he plans to go to law school to help those less fortunate than himself.

But right now, Salinas Chacon, 22, can’t see a future beyond October 2019. That’s when his status as a legal resident ends under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives legal status to children brought to this country by their parents. The program is at the center of a protracted political argument in Washington. Unless Congress reaches a compromise, Salinas Chacon and hundreds of thousands of others who were born elsewhere but grew up in the United States could be targeted for deportation in coming months and years.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article201739959.html#storylink=cpy

“We work hard for this country, and this is our home. We don’t know any other,” said Salinas Chacon, who came from El Salvador at age 5 after his father and grandfather were kidnapped by gangs. He and his brother grew up in Nashville and Louisville. “But now the rug is being pulled out from under us and we’re being played as chess pieces in a bigger political game.”

 

SNIP

 

The U.S. Supreme Court could decide Friday if it will review the lower court’s ban on DACA deportations.

Despite the turmoil and uncertainty, Salinas Chacon has stayed busy. He’s a peer mentor to other Latino students and works as the student assistant to the director of the EKU Latino Retention program. (Because of his immigration status, he cannot receive federal financial aid to help pay for college.)

“Omar stands as a paragon example of exactly what is at stake in this policy debate,” said Dr. David Coleman, director of EKU’s Honors Program. “Although always a stellar student, he has because of his immigration status been ineligible to apply for many of the nationally competitive fellowships for which he otherwise would have been extremely competitive.”

Dreamers are fighting.  We have to get their backs. 

Deporting Our Best, Keeping Our Worst

And the representation in the population of privileged white conservatard men rises every day that working, patriotic Americans are railroaded out of the country.

With every lost immigrant, America gains more gun-crazed, racist and misogynistic assholes just panting for the chance to kill more ni**ers and cunts.

We are eating our seed corn.

From Wonkette:

Another turn of the New Cruelty screw: Miguel Perez, Jr., 39, a green card holder who has been in the USA since he was eight years old, is facing deportation because he’s one of those criminal aliens we’re all supposed to be terrified of. Perez joined the Army in 2001 and served two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and he mistakenly thought taking his oath to defend the nation made him a citizen, but it didn’t. He could have applied for expedited citizenship, but didn’t since he didn’t look into the details. He also says his superiors in the military never offered him any help with becoming a citizen.

After three judges from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down his request to stay in the US last week, he announced Wednesday that he would begin a hunger strike. He believes that if he were sent back to Mexico, he’d be targeted by drug cartels, who seek out combat veterans to join them. If he were to refuse, he believes he’d be killed. That argument didn’t convince the three-judge appeals panel, which decided he needs to be deported.

“If it comes down to me being deported, I would rather leave this world in the country I gave my heart for,” Perez said in an interview from the detention center where he has been in custody for the last year.

Shame on those judges.  Shame on the U.S.Army for not defending one of their own.  Shame on the fucking fascists of ICE.   Shame on every piece-of-shit trump voter.

 

Thanksgiving Funny/Sad

Via Wonkette  Commenter Memzilla:

The Muslim Immigrant Who Saved Hundreds of American Lives

But this isn't unique or even unusual. Until a year ago, America has always been exactly what Lady Liberty says: a beacon to the oppressed of the world. Immigrants to America have always been profoundly grateful for the freedom, the opportunity, the safety America provides.

And they won't let the terrorists hurt her.

Christopher Dickey at the Daily Beast:

An Egyptian Muslim just-arrived in the United States on a Diversity Visa—precisely the type that Donald Trump is trying to blame for the bike-path murders on Halloween in Lower Manhattan—in fact stopped a terrorist atrocity that would have been much, much worse in 1997 on the New York City subway.

SNIP

(T)he young Egyptian, Abdel Rahman Mosabbah, from a small town on the Upper Nile near Luxor and the only member of his family with a university education, wanted to build a future in the United States. His was the classic immigrant dream: to put down roots and eventually to bring his wife and raise his family in a land of freedom and opportunity. He saw the terrorists as anything but heroes or martyrs. He saw them as a threat to him and to his new country that must be stopped. And had he not acted, the slaughter on the B Train would have been horrific.

The NYPD and FBI and probably the LIRR cops are much more aware than they once were. From 2002 onward, the NYPD searched and found already in its ranks among more than 30,000 sworn officers hundreds of people who spoke languages from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Asia because many of them had been born abroad. The job of a policeman, since the days of Irish, German, and Italian immigration in the 19th century, has always been a coveted position for newly arrived residents and citizens of the United States.

But here’s the question we ought to be asking ourselves today as we look back on that morning when jihadis were stopped in Brooklyn: Would an Abdel Rahman Mosabbah dare go to the police today? Would he go out in the heat of a dark summer night to try desperately to warn the cops of an impending attack when all Muslims, all immigrants, are being treated as suspect? Would he do that when diversity visas—like his visa—are being attacked by the president of the United States as if they they were a terrorist laissez-passer, a virtual license to kill?

In fact, this Muslim Diversity Visa recipient saved the lives of scores of Americans he had never met. And if Americans want to remain safe, they would do well to embrace such people, not shun them, shame them, and put them under threat.

Ethnic Cleansing in America

And for those sent back to be tortured and murdered, mass deportation is nothing less than genocide.

Erik Loomis at LGM:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a fascist police force engaging in widescale ethnic cleansing of the United States. Now that Trump and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (and I don’t care that Trump is bullying Sessions. That racist elf deserves everything that happens to him) have given ICE agents free run to be the racist strike force many of its employees want to be, they have acted wtih impunity. Because these victims of these fascists are poor, live in the shadows, and often don’t speak English (or even Spanish as many are indigenous), the mainstream reaction against Trump has put this issue too much on the backburner. But on the ground, it is horrifying.

Example A:

A 42-year-old Los Angeles pastor with two U.S. citizen children was detained by immigration authorities on Monday morning.

Noe Carias is the lead pastor at an Evangelical church near Echo Park, a position he has held for a number of years. He is originally from Guatemala and has been in the United States since he was 14 or 15, according to his wife. Carias was reportedly detained during a court appearance Monday during which he had been hoping to receive a stay of removal. His deportation order reportedly dates back to 1994 or 1995, according to advocates for the family. He previously received a stay of removal in 2014, and that same stay was extended in 2016.

“He has a U.S. citizen wife and he has two little children,” pastor and community organizer Martin Garcia told LAist. “They own a house, and at this moment the whole family is going to crumble because he was the economic support for the family. It’s going to have an impact.”

Then there are the legal immigrants snatched at INS offices where they came to get official papers.  And the orphans snatched out of adoptive homes and thrown into detention - and not the nice kind with protections against rape and beatings.

This revolting ethnic cleansing conducted with a government-approved fascist terrorist force has to be the top target of resisting Trump. Or a top target at least. We must not only demand that this stop, but that ICE should be disbanded and reconstituted with a different mandate and under a much more accountable authority. So long as we do not speak out against this agency and its agents on an individual agents if we know who they are, then we are culpable with the ethnic cleansing of our nation.

Shame on all of us who stand by and let this happen, good little germans that we are.

Darker Than a Paper Bag? Top Justice Official Thinks You're "Filth"

I honestly don't know why any repug these days is shying away from just screaming "NIGGER!" non-stop.

Charlie Pierce:

We're going to have to make a semi-regular daily feature on the doings of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, presently the Attorney General and the only man in America who thinks Birth of a Nation was a documentary. On Tuesday, he visited the border and, by way of encouraging the law-enforcement types gathered there, according to Tiger Beat On The Potomac, these were his prepared remarks:

"Depravity and violence are their calling cards, including brutal machete attacks and beheadings," he said. "It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth."

Nobody I know is in favor of depravity and violence—at least outside the studios of Fox News, anyway—nor is anyone I know in favor of machete attacks and/or beheadings, although some of our staunch allies elsewhere are rather high on the latter. But when you've got the attorney general of the United States planning to refer to other human beings, no matter how criminal they are, as "filth," you've got the Department of Justice descending into the status of a Breitbart comment thread, and that is never good for anyone. When it came time for the speech, Sessions ultimately did not say "filth" out loud, but the Department of Justice doubled down on the word in a statement.

SNIP

What matters to Sessions is putting lots of "brown people" in cells. He doesn't care how many or where. Maybe it's through his idiotic revival of the "war" on drugs. Maybe it's through these E-Z-Bake cook'em-and-eat'em immigration courts he's establishing at the border. Doesn't matter. To Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, America means locking up "brown people." Period.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal points out that Sessions has escalated the racist rhetoric from "illegal immigrants" to "criminal aliens" and writes:

What Sessions doesn’t want the American public to know is that the link between undocumented immigrants and violent crime is a myth. His lies are meant to fear-monger and provide cover for his racist policies.

SNIP

It would be disgraceful coming from any American — much less the Attorney General. Personally, I take this kind of thing as seriously as Sessions lying to Congress during his confirmation hearing. In a world that acknowledged equal justice for all, he would be out of a job for this speech alone.

Welcome to Kentucky, Mahmoud.

Because of Centre College, Boyle County is relatively liberal.  I expect people there will put down any attempt to treat you with anything less than legendary Kentucky friendliness.

From the Danville Advocate-Messenger:

Her husband, Mahmoud Al Saloum, arrived safely at the Lexington airport after close to two years of attempting to get his visa. 

“Gosh, what didn’t happen since we last spoke,” Morris said the day before she was to pick up “Ma.” Her voice was light and lively; so much different from when we first spoke in January in order to get their story out. 

Her husband, whom she married in Ghana in 2014, had been attempting to get an immigrant visa since June 3, 2015, in order to move to Junction City to be with Morris and their son, Aiden. Just when they thought his time would come, an executive order was signed banning travel from certain Muslim countries. Although Saloum wasn’t living in any of those countries, because he’s Syrian, there was an even greater chance he may have never been approved. 

Morris says she’s been told to get an immigrant visa, the average wait-time is roughly 60 days.

“We’ve been back and forth, back and forth — so many times. They kept telling him to come back in a week, come back in another week, then another week …” Morris says. “We buckled down and just did all we could. Then, last week, they called him on Wednesday afternoon and said to be there Friday.”

 Click here for a photo of Mahmoud meeting his son.

From the Danville Advocate-Messenger:
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article143330564.html#storylink=cpy