Tag: Trump racism

Trump once advocated a ‘huge financial penalty’ for those employing undocumented immigrants

During the recent government shutdown, a number of people who worked for Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., were summoned to the facility — then closed for the season — for a meeting with their bosses. There, they were fired, some after years of service, because they were in the country illegally. The terminations followed a similar action at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., last year.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that there are entire communities of former Trump Organization employees in Central America, people who once worked illegally for President Trump’s sprawling resort empire as undocumented immigrants, often with their supervisors’ knowledge. People who helped build the Trump Organization as it now is, some of whom were lucky to avoid the fate of those staffers in Westchester, moving back home before the politics of a president railing against illegal immigration while profiting from undocumented immigrants’ work became untenable. Continue reading “Trump once advocated a ‘huge financial penalty’ for those employing undocumented immigrants”

Trump team: Returning the kids we stole would be bad for the kids

Credit: Jabin Botsford,, The Washington Post

First, the Trump administration stole children from their families. Now they say returning the children would do harm.

The Trump administration now says that returning the thousands of children it ripped from families would do harm to them, and they’re using the claim as justification for holding the children hostage. In reality, they’re admitting just how much of a disaster they’ve created.

In a court filing, the administration stated it “would present grave child welfare concerns” to remove children currently living with the “sponsor” homes hosting them after Trump separated them from their families. The administration effectively wants to pass over those with sponsor families.

“The Trump administration’s response is a shocking concession that it can’t easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents and doesn’t even think it’s worth the time to locate each of them,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU attorney in the case forcing the latest Trump disclosure.

View the complete February 4 article by Oliver Willis on the Shareblue website here.

Why does the president keep talking about women and duct tape on the border?

Credit: Evan Vucci, AP

While discussing the temporary end to the government shutdown on Friday afternoon, President Trump appeared to meander out of the Rose Garden and into a “Law & Order: SVU” episode. Once there, he described a horrific scene that seems to exist only in his own mind, but that he’s been repeating in speeches for weeks: There are migrant women at the border. They are being tortured. They have tape on their mouths.

Specifically: “Women are tied up, with duct tape on their faces, put in the backs of vans,” the president said, citing human traffickers who he alleges are the perpetrators of this violence against migrants.

But women are not tied up, experts have said. They do not have tape on their mouths. When Trump repeated this claim a few weeks ago, my colleague Katie Mettler contacted many authorities on trafficking who have spent time at the border, and none of them had seen or heard anything resembling the violence he described.

View the complete January 26 column by Monica Hesse on The Washington Post website here.

U.S. to Begin Blocking Asylum Seekers From Entering Over Mexican Border

Honduran migrants in San Ysidro, Calif., after crossing under the United States border wall to seek asylum last month. Credit: Rebecca Blackwell, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Thursday that it would start blocking a small number of asylum seekers from entering the United States from Mexico, using the San Ysidro border crossing near San Diego as the first location to turn back immigrants applying for refugee status.

The policy to block asylum seekers was first announced last month by Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It will gradually be expanded over the next two weeks at border crossings with heavy foot traffic in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, according to a senior United States official briefed on the move, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The move is intended to dissuade immigrants, mostly from Central America, from making the long and dangerous journey through Mexico to the southwestern United States border. The policy is likely to intensify pressure on the Mexican authorities, who are already struggling to deal with thousands of Central American immigrants who have applied for humanitarian visas in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala.

View the complete January 24 article by Glenn Thrush on The New York Times website here.

DNC on Report that Thousands More Children Were Separated From Their Families at the Border Than Previously Reported

DNC Chair Tom Perez released the following statement after the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Inspector General reported that the Trump administration likely separated thousands more children from their families than previously believed:

“The cruelty and incompetence of this administration knows no bounds. Just when we thought the family separation nightmare at the border couldn’t get any worse, we find out that Trump has been lying about the full scope of the humanitarian disaster he created. What will it take for the rest of the Republican Party to wake up and take a stand against this president’s inhumane policies? Democrats believe that families belong together, and we will keep fighting to reunite all children who have been separated from their parents.”

Steve King and Donald Trump: mutual fans and echoes

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called King’s behavior “abhorrent.” But Trump and King have a long history together. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

“I am just a big fan in what he stands for.”

— Donald Trump, joint interview with Rep. Steve King on Iowa’s “Mickelson in the Morning,” Oct. 14, 2014

In the New York Times interview that caused a firestorm, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) says he once told President Trump: “I market-tested your immigration policy for 14 years.”

After all, King was advocating for a border wall — a “King wall” as he called it — as early as 2006, almost 10 years before the concept of a wall along the southern border turned up in Trump’s announcement that he was running for president.

View the complete January 17 article by Glen Kessler and Meg Kelly on The Washington Post website here.

IG: Trump administration took thousands more migrant children from parents

In this July 26, 2018, file photo, a migrant child holds the hand of a Lutheran Social Services worker helping to reunited children separated from their parents. Credit: Matt York, AP

The Trump administration separated thousands more migrant children from their parents at the U.S. border than has previously been made public, according to an investigative report released Thursday, but the federal tracking system has been so poor that the precise number is hazy.

According to the report issued by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, the separated children include 118 taken between July and early November — after the administration halted a short-lived family separation effort that provoked a political firestorm and public outrage.

The report estimates that thousands of other youngsters were taken starting early in the Trump administration, months before the government announced it would separate children in order to criminally prosecute their parents, through late last spring.

View the complete January 17 article by Amy Goldstein on The Washington Post website here.

Federal judge rules against Trump administration’s plan to add 2020 census citizenship question

A federal judge in Manhattan ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census was unlawful.

In his ruling, Judge Jesse Furman, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision to add the question to the census was “arbitrary and capricious” and enjoined the administration from including it on the questionnaire.

Furman, an Obama appointee, said Ross violated a statute that requires him to collect data through the acquisition and use of “administrative records” instead of through “direct inquiries” on a survey such as the census.

View the complete January 15 article by Lydia Wheeler on The Hill website here.

DNC on Court Ruling Against Citizenship Census Question

DNC Chair Tom Perez released the following statement after a U.S. District Court judge ordered the Trump Administration to remove a question about citizenship from the 2020 census:

“Donald Trump needs to stop using the census as a political tool to disempower Latinos and communities of color. This ruling is a victory for our democracy and our values of equality and opportunity for all. Nobody is fooled by this administration’s attempt to intimidate and undercount immigrant communities, or take away states’ fair share of resources and representation. And Democrats will continue to fight Trump and the Republican Party’s transparent attack on our Constitution.”

Fact-checking President Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration

The president’s address to the nation on immigration was littered with falsehoods he’s said before. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

The first misleading statement in President Trump’s Oval Office address Tuesday night came in the first sentence.

Trump, addressing a national television audience from behind his desk, warned of a “security crisis at the southern border” — even though the number of people caught trying to cross illegally is near 20-year lows.

Another false claim came moments later, when Trump said border agents “encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country” every day, though his administration puts the daily average for 2018 in the hundreds. A few sentences later, he said 90 percent of the heroin in the United States comes across the border with Mexico, ignoring the fact that most of the drugs come through legal entry points and wouldn’t be stopped by the border wall that he is demanding as the centerpiece of his showdown with Democrats.

View the complete January 9 by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.