THE ERA OF TRUMP

[Speaker to Animals]

[Penner]

Obama never sepreated families at the border: This is all Trump.

Critics of the Trump administration’s separating of families illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico have characterized the practice as a distinctly cruel feature of Donald Trump’s presidency.

But some Republican commentators argue the policy is essentially a continuation of previous administrations.

"You know what's ironic? It's the same way Barack Obama did it," conservative commentator Matt Schlapp said during the June 15 broadcast of Fox News' America's Newsroom. "This is the problem with all of these things, the outrage you see coming from the left. There wasn't outrage over Barack Obama separating kids from adults."

While the Obama administration's immigration approach was not without controversy, it’s simply untrue to say he had a policy of separating families.

Trump policy
Let’s recap what the Trump administration is doing, before turning to Obama’s handling of immigration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April announced a "zero-tolerance" policy, meaning every person caught crossing the border illegally would be referred for federal prosecution.

A good number of these people are adult migrants traveling with children. By law, when adults are detained and criminally prosecuted, their children cannot be housed with them in jail. Instead, kids are placed in a Department of Health and Human Services shelter until they can be released to a legal guardian.

Some 2,000 children have been separated from the adults they were traveling with across the U.S. border, according to the latest figures from the Department of Homeland Security. The children were separated from 1,940 adults from April 19 through May 31 as a result of border-crossing prosecutions.

Obama policy
Immigration experts we spoke to said Obama-era policies did lead to some family separations, but only relatively rarely, and nowhere near the rate of the Trump administration. (A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said the Obama administration did not count the number of families separated at the border.)

"Obama generally refrained from prosecution in cases involving adults who crossed the border with their kids," said Peter Margulies, an immigration law and national security law professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. "In contrast, the current administration has chosen to prosecute adult border-crossers, even when they have kids. That's a choice — one fundamentally different from the choice made by both Obama and previous presidents of both parties."

Denise Gilman, a law professor who directs the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, said immigration attorneys "occasionally" saw separated families under the Obama administration.

"However, these families were usually reunited quite quickly once identified," she said, "even if that meant release of a parent from adult detention."

In Trump’s case, family separations are a feature, not a bug, of the administration’s border policies, said David Fitzgerald, who co-directs the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies.

"The family separations are not the small-scale collateral consequences of a border policy, but rather, a deliberate initiative," he added.

Former Obama officials in recent interviews drew sharp distinctions between Trump’s policy and that of his predecessors.

The Trump administration's current approach is modeled after Operation Streamline, a 2005 program under the administration of George W. Bush, according to Obama spokesman Eric Schultz. The key difference, he said, is that while the 2005 program referred all illegal immigrants for prosecution, it made exceptions for adults traveling with children.

Jeh Johnson, Obama’s Homeland Security secretary from 2013 to the end of his presidency, said such separations occurred in rare cases, but never as a matter of policy.

"I can't say that it never happened. There may have been some exigent situation, some emergency," Johnson told NPR June 9. "There may have been some doubt about whether the adult accompanying the child was in fact the parent of the child. I can't say it never happened — but not as a matter of policy or practice. It's not something that I could ask our Border Patrol or our immigration enforcement personnel to do."

Obama’s top domestic policy adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, said the Obama administration briefly weighed the separation of parents from children, before deciding against it.

"I do remember looking at each other like, ‘We’re not going to do this, are we?’ We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea," she told the New York Times. "The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are."

Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute, said that, as a deterrent, the Obama administration began prosecuting border-crossers who had already been deported at least once.

"But very few of those people crossed with children, so it didn’t become as visible an issue," he said. "There was some child separation and some pushback by immigrant advocacy groups around that, but the numbers were quite limited.

"The idea of prosecuting people who cross the border illegally the first time they are caught is entirely new," he added. "So we haven’t seen children separated from their parents on anything near this scale before."

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/st ... ilies-was/

[Speaker to Animals]

Yes, he did. The photos the lugenpresse got you all upset over were taken in 2014.

[Fife]

My not-quite perfect eyesight will not hold me back in the Space Force.

[Fife]

Commander Ruz is looking tight.

[Kath]

Commander Ruz is looking tight.

Good reminder for Ted Cruz to never do drag. Yikes. Thanks, Fife. I hope I can return the favor.

[PartyOf5]

Like this one?

Four months later, a bipartisan group of senators announced that they’d reached consensus on a DACA replacement bill: Even though the president and GOP leadership had claimed to support legal status for Dreamers as an end in itself (and thus should have been prepared to support legislation that does nothing but that), Democrats nonetheless agreed to back a Dream Act that includes funding for Trump’s border wall, limits on the ability of legal U.S. residents to sponsor their adult children for immigration, and a reduction in diversity visas — provisions championed by Republicans and loathed by the progressive base.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... -deal.html

I don't see the part in the article where it says the bill passed and was then vetoed. I guess that's cause it never happened.

Right. No bill was ever passed that he vetoed. None of the bipartisan proposals ever went for vote and passed.

There was never a bill with the single purpose of building a wall to slow down illegal immigration. That's because Democrats don't want to slow it down. The reason is so they can bribe them to vote Democrat. They don't give a shit about them as human beings, just as votes and people to clean their homes.

[SuburbanFarmer]

So, is the Pentagon going to be a Hexagon, or are the Marines rejoining the Navy?

And are we claiming the moon as territory now?

[Speaker to Animals]

Cognitive dissonance ↑

[SuburbanFarmer]

Legitimate questions. Just trying to define the Crazy.