The Separating Immigrant Families Scam: For more than a month we have been told that the U.S. Attorney General's decision to prosecute every foreign national who crosses the border illegally has created a crisis on par with the Holocaust, where tens of thousands of helpless children have been pulled from their parents and thrown into internment camps as reported by CNN and virtually every other news outlet. Sounds of children crying and photos of children in cages have accompanied these reports. Trump did this, we are told, and to send that message home Time Magazine put the President and a crying little girl separated from her parents by his policies on its cover this week. Should we believe what the major media, open borders groups like La Raza, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and two dozen other liberal democrats are saying? Probably not. As Heather McDonald notes in this City Journal piece, when the Obama Administration attempted to hold child-toting asylum-seekers until their claims could be heard, the Ninth Circuit announced that a child could not be housed with the adult and must be released within 20 days, or release both adult and child together.
The Obama administration usually chose the second option. "Word coursed through Mexico and Central America that taking a child
across the border was a get-out-of-jail-free card that would exempt its
holder from both criminal prosecution and detention."
This child-release
lever, coupled with Obama's announcement in 2012 that he would grant
amnesty to the so-called Dreamers, meant that Obama soon had his own
family border crisis on his hands. In 2014, 70,000 adult-child units and
70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended illegally crossing into
the U.S. The administration tried building large family detention
centers to hold the children and their accompanying adults, but the same
Flores decree that has bedeviled the Trump White House stymied
that effort. In 2015, a federal trial judge, Holly Gee, herself
appointed by Obama and the very definition of an activist jurist, vastly
expanded the scope of the original decree and ordered the
administration to release the detained minors. The Department of Homeland Security warned that ending family detention would trigger
another border surge. Judge Gee dismissed this concern as
"fear-mongering," according to the Associated Press. By the way, the
first photos of cages harboring children were taken during the Obama
Administration and, according to the father of the little girl on the
Time cover, she was never taken from her mother.
Decencyevolves: Watch this video from your hometown newspaper and tell me how this is all a scam. Perhaps you, like Ann Coulter, believe the children and parents affected by this misguided policy were “crisis actors.” Have a little bit of heart Kent. https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article213669584.html
Why is your comment on this post addressed to me, DE?
I noticed that your staff, rather than you, posted this after I sent my reply. I wonder though, at this post. It isn’t Schumer and Pelosi that are issuing news reports on this subject. It’s newspapers including your hometown newspaper, broadcast stations, and journalists of all kinds, apart from Breitbart, the Daily Caller and Fox. Is that the best response: “fake news by the liberal media?”
Other conservative voices—Laura Bush, John McCain and George Will to name a few, have been less doctrinaire and have shown more compassion towards parents who are being separated from their children. Many of them are first time entrants fleeing violence and seeking asylum. It’s worth thinking about.
CJLF Staff is not limited to people who report to me. I do not run the entire organization.
This post is deeply offensive. It's not just that children are being separated from their parents when they cross the border; it's that in some cases, the children are being shipped hundreds of miles away, and when their parents are released from detention (which they usually are in a fairly short period of time, since illegal entry is a misdemeanor), there is no functional plan or uniform procedure in place to reunify them. For crying out loud, even violent felons serving lengthy prison sentences cannot have their children taken away and sent to another state with no due process whatsoever; in fact, most of the time their kids are welcome to visit them in prison. And the notion that all of these people are just using their kids as a "scam" to enter the USA? Many of these people are fleeing gang violence and poverty so extreme that it poses a danger to their children's wellbeing, and they are fleeing with the hope of finding a better life for those children.
Also, at least in my jurisdiction, we have serious violent crimes we cannot prosecute because victims and witnesses won't cooperate for fear of being detected and detained by ICE, whether their status is legal or otherwise. To implement a "zero tolerance" policy without thinking through the consequences or figuring out in advance how to handle all these kids and having a uniform reunification plan is both unconscionable and utterly stupid. Great balls of fire, this is the most hateful post I can remember seeing on this blog.
Decencyevolves: So some unnamed CJLF staffer puts out this post. Their Director of Litigation proclaims he has nothing to do with it when commenters excoriate it. As to the merits of the post, all we hear is the sound of silence. If we were wrong to criticize it, you’d think we’d hear a defense of it. The silence speaks volumes.
Actually, the fact that the author of a post has not responded to comments says nothing at all. This blog is not anyone's primary job. It often happens that the author of a post is simply too busy with higher priority matters to respond to blog comments.
I only chimed in to correct your mistaken impression that this post was written by me or under my supervision.
Your faux outrage is devoid of facts. In fact, it contains outright falsehoods. For example, nowhere in the OP does the staff member indicate that "all" of the people are using the kids as scams. It's just not there. The writer never said it and it is completely your invention.
The fact of the matter is that there is a great deal of fraud going on (BTW, a felony, not a misdemeanor) of people claiming that kids are their own when really the adult is a coyote, sex trafficker, etc. Yes, there is indeed a "scam." Much more important than keeping the kids and adults together is making sure that the children belong with the adult. A failure to do so would be met with the same condemnation from the likes of you because your purpose is open borders and ginning up faux outrage, not doing something constructive.
The real problem is the Flores consent decree. Tell Schumer and the Dems to agree to fix it.
As far as fleeing gang violence and poverty, almost none of those cases are eligible for asylum, which requires persecution based on race, religion, social group (such as homosexuals), nationality, or political opinion. Gang violence and poverty are not qualifiers. Even if they were qualified, asylum seekers are supposed to apply in the first safe country they enter. In case of Central Americans, that would be Mexico.
Finally, if you legitimately cared about these children, the last thing you would want is for them to make a trek where 80% of females, both adults and children, are raped.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/57/Argument-from-Silence