The following article by Froma Harrop was posted on the Creators.com website July 19, 2018:
Credit: WMTV
Are President Trump’s threats and insults against our allies just an obnoxious negotiating tactic? It hardly matters, because they haven’t worked. And it’s worse than not working. Trump has turned “made in America” into consumer poison around the globe.
Trump is not content to wage a simple war on trade, itself an economically ignorant endeavor. He feels compelled to also dump invective on the foreigners who buy our goods and services. Whether to entertain his base or to serve the interests of Vladimir Putin, the result is long-lasting damage to our producers. No discernable American interest hides in this rubble.
China is playing it cool so far, but it can also play it hot. When South Korea last year deployed a missile shield — seen as a hostile move in China — a Chinese celebrity told her 2.7 million followers on social media to boycott Korean products. In a mere month, the Korean carmaker Hyundai saw its market share in China fall by nearly half.
The following article by Alan Pyke was posted on the ThinkProgress.org website July 23, 2018:
From holding cells nicknamed the “hielera” or icebox, to the supposedly friendlier housing at “Casa Padre,” migrant kids describe a hellscape of cruel guards, sickening food, and psychological torture.
A security guard checks cars at the entrance to Casa Padre, a former Walmart, now a center for unaccompanied immigrant children. Over 2,300 immigrant children wereseparated from their parents. Credit: Spencer Platt, Getty Images
Children are being cussed out by guards and subsisting on meager rations of beans, crackers, and tortillas that leave them feeling ill in a converted Walmart in south Texas.
The new reports of harsh physical conditions, humiliating psychological abuse, and basic deprivation come from children held at the so-called “Casa Padre” facility in Brownsville, Texas, almost a month after President Donald Trump took symbolic steps to quash public outcry over his family separation policy aimed at punishing and deterring migrants.
The children and parents who swore out hundreds of affidavits to attorneys appealing the United States government’s treatment of migrants have mostly fled violence in Central America. The conditions in which they find themselves today in the world’s richest and most powerful country shock the conscience — and almost certainly violate the conditions of the legal settlement that’s bound American officials in treatment of minors in immigration detention for decades, lawyers say.
Today, the Trump administration has defied a court order and failed to meet yet another reunification deadline to reunite more than 1,500 children who were separated from their parents. Make no mistake–Trump created the family separation crisis, and his own policy has led to thousands of children being separated from their families.
When history is written, Trump’s treatment of immigrant families will be remembered as one of our nation’s darkest hours. America has forever been a nation of immigrants, yet the Trump administration is actively engineering a humanitarian crisis.
Now, the Trump administration is using every excuse not to reunite separated families. They’ve continued to incarcerate children in nightmarish conditions, deport parents without their children, and refuse immigrants urgent medical care with dire consequences. They’re even putting infants into deportation court by themselves. The only reason any children have been reunited with their parents is because courts are forcing the Trump administration to start dealing with the crisis they created. Trump officials deserve no credit for these reunifications. Continue reading “Trump’s Family Separation Crisis”
Today, the Trump administration failed to meet yet another court-ordered reunification deadline today to reunite more than 1,500 children who were separated from their parents. DNC Chair Tom Perez released the following statement:
“The unconscionable cruelty continues. Once again, the Trump administration has defied a court order and failed to reunite children with their parents after heartlessly tearing them apart. When history is written, Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrant families will be remembered as one of our nation’s darkest hours.
“All children must be reunited with their parents immediately. Democrats believe that diversity and compassion are our nation’s greatest strengths. We believe in fixing our immigration system, not uprooting lives and shattering families. If Republicans truly cared about these families and American values, they would help Democrats end Trump’s humanitarian crisis by passing a bipartisan solution that actually protects children.”
The following article by Melissa boteach Sawn Fremstad, Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Heidi Schultheis and Rachel West was posted on the Center for American Progress website July 19, 2018:
Immigrant families and activists rally outside the Tennessee state Capitol in Nashville, May 31, 2018. Credit: Drew Angerer, Getty
President Donald Trump is preparing to unilaterally and fundamentally change the U.S. system for legal immigration in ways that would restrict immigration to the wealthiest and most privileged applicants. Under a new policy being drafted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an archaic federal immigration provision known as the “public charge” test would be reinterpreted to limit both family-unity and diversity-based immigration in ways that are a radical departure from current immigration law.1 Under the rewritten test, people would generally fail if they had income and resources of less than 250 percent of the federal poverty guidelines or had a medical condition and no unsubsidized source of health insurance.2
In this brief, the Center for American Progress aims to give the public a sense of the radical nature of the unilateral action the Trump administration is planning. To do so, the authors estimate what would happen if all people in the United States—U.S.-born citizens and immigrants alike—had to take this “Trump test,” based on the most recently leaked draft of the rule.3 According to CAP’s estimates, the proposed Trump test is so restrictive that more than 100 million people—about one-third of the U.S. population—would fail if they were required to take it today.
This estimate is a conservative one that is based on a snapshot of people’s current circumstances. Yet the Trump test is ongoing, so people who pass the test today could very well fail it in the near future due to economic downturns, mass layoffs, job insecurity, health problems, disability, or other factors. While, in this brief, the authors do not estimate an upper bound for Trump test failures, it is reasonable to assume that at least half of all people in the United States could fail this test over a period of several years.4
The following commentary by Jonathan Capehart was posted on the Washington Post website July 8, 2018:
President Trump spoke about international relations and national politics at a rally in Great Falls, Mont., on July 5. (Patrick Martin /The Washington Post)
Without question, President Trump’s Catskills roast of a Montana rally on July 5 was a gasp-worthy disaster. Still, it was, as we used to say as kids, just more of the “same old, same old.” An hour-long rant that mixed the greatest hits from his racist and xenophobic campaign for the White House with some flecks of new material. What has changed is the heightened atmosphere of danger in which he delivered them 18 months into his presidency.
Monday night, before a national audience, the president is expected to hand a rose to his second nominee to the Supreme Court. The retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing vote, gives Trump the chance to give conservatives the majority they worked decades to achieve. And that will give them a chance to take a sledgehammer to rights they abhor, from abortion to same-sex marriage.
The nation remains appalled by Trump’s morally bankrupt “zero-tolerance” policy, which separated migrant children from their parents at the border and set up jails for babies. Now that his feckless administration is under court order to reunite the children with their parents, its sheer incompetence is plain for all to see. Just when you thought the callous disregard for these children couldn’t get any worse, the New York Times reported last week that “records linking children to their parents have disappeared, and in some cases have been destroyed.” And don’t forget that the Trump administration is going after naturalized U.S. citizensnow, too.
The following commentary was posted on the Uexpress.com website July 5, 2018:
In “The Politics of Rage,” his brilliant 1995 analysis of George Wallace’s visceral appeal, scholar Dan T. Carter notes that the infamous Alabama segregationist had an uncanny ability to home in on the fears and resentments of working-class whites who were angered by cultural change. And that exceptional talent not only propelled Wallace’s remarkable political career, but it also reshaped America’s conservative movement, Carter explained.
“In speech after speech, Wallace knit together the strands of racism with those of a deeply rooted xenophobic ‘plain folk’ cultural outlook which equated social change with moral corruption. The creators of public policy — the elite — were out of touch with hardworking taxpayers who footed the bill for their visionary social engineering at home and weak-minded defense of American interests abroad,” Carter wrote.
Sound familiar? President Donald J. Trump has picked up the Alabama governor’s playbook, using a crude and unscripted rhetoric full of racism and xenophobia to tap into the barely submerged prejudices, misplaced rage and assumptions of privilege that animate a significant portion of the nation’s white working class.
Trump likes to boast that he is “strong” on immigration — but 58 percent of voters actually oppose his immigration policy, while only 39 percent agree with it.
When asked to describe the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy that forces families to be separated, the top three responses are “sad,” “terrible,” and “bad.”
The following article by Rebecca Jayne Wolfe, Fellow, Program for Refugees, Forced Migration and Humanitarian Action, Yale University, was posted on the Conversation website June 25, 2018:
Credit: AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert
The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld the Trump administration’s policy barring people from several predominantly Muslim nations from entering the U.S., ruling that the travel ban was an appropriate use of executive power aimed at strengthening national security.
The following article by Elizabeth Preza was posted on the AlterNet.org website June 26, 2018:
A reminder that elections have consequences.
It’s no secret Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is obsessed with judges. He’s called the decision not to fill a Supreme Court vacancy under former President Barack Obama “the most consequential decision I’ve ever made in my entire public career” and declared the judiciary his “top priority” in the Senate. And on Tuesday, following a series of Supreme Court rulings that sided with the Trump administration, he straight-up gloated about his judicial heist.
Trump’s 
