PRESIDENT TRUMPS FEAR-BASED IMMIGRATION ORDERS

[DemocratSinceBirth]

"Is one of the goals here mass deportation?” a reporter asked Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, on Tuesday, trying to get some clarification on just how broad the scope of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration enforcement might be. Two implementation memorandums that the Department of Homeland Security had issued earlier in the day suggested that the breadth might be stunning, indeed. But Spicer didn’t see it that way. “No,” he replied, with a half-puzzled look, as though he were surprised that anyone might worry, for a moment, about how Trump might change not only the lives of the undocumented but also the lives of their family members and neighbors, and even the mission of law enforcement in this country.

“Not at all?” the reporter asked.

Spicer said that the press just wasn’t seeing the big picture. “What we have to get back to is understanding a couple of things,” he said, foremost among them being that the White House shouldn’t be choosing which people it would deport for violating immigration laws and which it would not. That reply, though, suggests that the correct answer to the reporter’s first question was “yes” or, at best, “maybe, eventually.” The status quo has involved setting priorities about whom to deport. There are so many undocumented people in the United States that there either have to be such priorities, or else a large scale refocussing toward mass deportation and, most likely, a far greater and more intrusive role for law enforcement in the lives of the documented and undocumented alike. Under the Obama Administration, the priority was people who had been convicted of dangerous crimes. The Trump executive order starts with the idea that criminal aliens are the problem, but then widens the definition of criminality and blurs its edges. The relevant passage in the D.H.S. memorandums on who will be a priority for deportation points to any undocumented people who:

...


The guidance from the Department of Homeland Security comes at a time when the country is waiting for President Trump to issue yet another executive order related to who can be in America. This would be, effectively, the second draft of an order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries and all refugees. The original version has been suspended, thanks to a temporary restraining order issued by a judge in Seattle, which was upheld by a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit, and is the subject of continuing legislation. One problem those judges saw with the order also appears to be present in the new orders on immigration enforcement: statements from the Trump Administration that dismissed concerns about the orders’ reach. In the case of the seven-country ban, for example, there had been a great deal of obfuscation about whether it would apply to green-card holders. (The text suggests that it does.) In the case of these orders, there is the large and lurking idea that immigrants in general are dangerous, even murderous threats—stealing jobs, stealing lives, the explanation for all that is wrong—and that if that danger is not manifest today, it will be tomorrow. When Trump sets “priorities,” he does so like a bully, trying to find who is weakest and least protected. The question is whether the neighbors of the undocumented will stand up for them, or look away.


http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/president-trumps-fear-based-immigration-orders

The more I read about Drumpf's ersatz mass deportation plan the less empathy I have for the Deplorables who enabled him to implement it. I think I will reserve all my empathy for the families who will be ripped apart.

[Phoenix61]

1. I think his timing is suspect

This taps into peoples' fear so we will stop talking about Russia. Gets everybody all riled up. Reporters can get those "great" photos of children crying as their parents are being taken away. Much more interesting than dry, old money laundering and collusion with a foreign government to hijack the election.

Definitely not meant to minimize the suffering of the people who will be directly impacted by the orders, just saying Bannon would have his mother thrown under the bus to deflect attention from the 45-Russia connection.