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Post by onelasttime on Jan 30, 2024 2:33:05 GMT
😂. I absolutely knew you would not directly answer the question. You never disappoint. Whatever aj2hall did or did not do or say has nothing to do about the man’s character in general. Oh by the way. President Biden wasn’t looking at his watch while the 13 coffins were being unloaded. He was looking at his son Beau’s rosary beads he wears wrapped around his wrist. Actually he was. This came up at the time and that was when it was revealed he wore his dead son rosary beads on his wrist. And you still haven’t answered the question. 🐔 |
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casii
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,525 
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Post by casii on Jan 30, 2024 2:33:42 GMT
I'm not going to post links because some peas are resistant to TikTok, but Representative Jeff Jackson of North Carolina has a great account on TikTok. I'm assuming he may also be on Instagram. He posts levelheaded information about several topics in Congress. One of his more recent ones was on the bipartisan bill on immigration about ready to come to be presented for a vote. Bipartisan being the key word. He also said the GOP may prevent it from coming to a vote because it might be seen as a win for Biden. Lo and behold, he was right. Both parties are not 2 sides of the same evil coin. Found it! Jeff Jackson on Immigration |
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Post by morecowbell on Jan 30, 2024 2:46:48 GMT
Actually he was. This came up at the time and that was when it was revealed he wore his dead son rosary beads on his wrist. Again, no, he wasn't. Again, I back my statement with video: And a still picture: Twitter Disagree? Prove it. You really shouldn't be bitching about me not answering you, when you so often don’t answer my questions. So often. Here's just the latest you left unanswered, asked well before you asked: I took it down to the basics so you shouldn't have any trouble understanding  it this time... "What if 12 people a day kept illegally entering your home, taking up residence and the police cheif wasn't enforcing the law, but said he'd make you a deal to enforce the law. What if he said he'd enforce the law once it hit an average of 8 people a day illegally entering your home and taking up residence If you said no, do your fucking job, are YOU responsible for tanking his useless "deal"?" |
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Post by onelasttime on Jan 30, 2024 3:21:56 GMT
Actually he was. This came up at the time and that was when it was revealed he wore his dead son rosary beads on his wrist. Again, no, he wasn't. Again, I back my statement with video: And a still picture: Twitter Disagree? Prove it. You really shouldn't be bitching about me not answering you, when you so often don’t answer my questions. So often. Here's just the latest you left unanswered, asked well before you asked: I took it down to the basics so you shouldn't have any trouble understanding it this time... "What if 12 people a day kept illegally entering your home, taking up residence and the police cheif wasn't enforcing the law, but said he'd make you a deal to enforce the law. What if he said he'd enforce the law once it hit an average of 8 people a day illegally entering your home and taking up residence If you said no, do your fucking job, are YOU responsible for tanking his useless "deal"?" Ah I said what I thought about immigration reform in another post, but here it is. What you are doing are what ifs. What I want is genuine immigration reform and I want Congress to do their fucking job to come up with said immigration reform. As pointed out in another post President Obama tried to get immigration reform, couldn’t get it, wanted to try and offer some protection to the Dreamers and ended up doing it by executive order. It’s been challenged left and right that would not have happened if Congress did their fucking job and written a new bill providing the reforms that are needed as well offering protection to these kids. The answer…. “There are two options. Option #1 Let President Biden do stuff by Executive Order. I have said why I don’t support that. You can read it in the other post because I’m not going to repeat it here. Option #2 Which I support. Have Congress do what they are elected to do and that is create legislation to deal with problems in this country. The Senators have done just that. However the House Republicans have said no way, let the President do it by executive order. And here’s why they are saying that. There is no way in hell the President can adequately address all the immigration issues that need to be addressed by Executive Order. And House Republicans know this which means they can continue to use immigration as a weapon against the President and Democrats. Nor do they want any legislation because that would be a combined effort which means they couldn’t seriously criticize it because they help create it. As to the Republicans wanting to sink any legislation, there is a post of trump saying just that. So based on your relentless harping about that “compassion” statement and that trump really meant what he said, you have to believe what he said in the post that I posted in one of the threads that it was ok to blame him for the Republicans sinking immigration reform legislation . That is my opinion on the subject and I’m more than comfortable with it. Agree or disagree that is your choice.” |
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Post by morecowbell on Jan 30, 2024 4:11:57 GMT
Again, no, he wasn't. Again, I back my statement with video: And a still picture: Twitter Disagree? Prove it. You really shouldn't be bitching about me not answering you, when you so often don’t answer my questions. So often. Here's just the latest you left unanswered, asked well before you asked: I took it down to the basics so you shouldn't have any trouble understanding it this time... "What if 12 people a day kept illegally entering your home, taking up residence and the police cheif wasn't enforcing the law, but said he'd make you a deal to enforce the law. What if he said he'd enforce the law once it hit an average of 8 people a day illegally entering your home and taking up residence If you said no, do your fucking job, are YOU responsible for tanking his useless "deal"?" Ah I said what I thought about immigration reform in another post, but here it is. What you are doing are what ifs. What I want is genuine immigration reform and I want Congress to do their fucking job to come up with said immigration reform. As pointed out in another post President Obama tried to get immigration reform, couldn’t get it, wanted to try and offer some protection to the Dreamers and ended up doing it by executive order. It’s been challenged left and right that would not have happened if Congress did their fucking job and written a new bill providing the reforms that are needed as well offering protection to these kids. The answer…. “There are two options. Option #1 Let President Biden do stuff by Executive Order. I have said why I don’t support that. You can read it in the other post because I’m not going to repeat it here. Option #2 Which I support. Have Congress do what they are elected to do and that is create legislation to deal with problems in this country. The Senators have done just that. However the House Republicans have said no way, let the President do it by executive order. And here’s why they are saying that. There is no way in hell the President can adequately address all the immigration issues that need to be addressed by Executive Order. And House Republicans know this which means they can continue to use immigration as a weapon against the President and Democrats. Nor do they want any legislation because that would be a combined effort which means they couldn’t seriously criticize it because they help create it. As to the Republicans wanting to sink any legislation, there is a post of trump saying just that. So based on your relentless harping about that “compassion” statement and that trump really meant what he said, you have to believe what he said in the post that I posted in one of the threads that it was ok to blame him for the Republicans sinking immigration reform legislation . That is my opinion on the subject and I’m more than comfortable with it. Agree or disagree that is your choice.” No, I'm not doing "what ifs". Im talking about what IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING. You asked "Tell me again how the Republicans are not trying to tank any immigration reform legislation being passed before the election." ...and I simply answered that question by trying to get you to put yourself in their shoes. Biden's DECEMBER (1 single month) numbers are almost identical to the numbers of the entire 2017 fiscal year. 🤯 Biden Shatters Record With Historic Number Of Illegal Alien Encounters In December “Today’s historical border numbers confirm what we already know. The Biden Admin is not using existing authority to secure the border. This continues to be a crisis by design, it’s overwhelming Border Patrol, and overrunning American communities.” -Former Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad WolfBiden is doing it on purpose! "The same authority Biden used to reverse almost every Trump policy at the border — including terminating the national emergency declaration at the border upon taking office — can be used to make significant changes." Bill Melugin |
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rodeomom
Pearl Clutcher
Refupee # 380 "I don't have to run fast, I just have to run faster than you."
Posts: 3,675
Location: Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma
Jun 25, 2014 23:34:38 GMT
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Post by rodeomom on Jan 30, 2024 5:28:29 GMT
"Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it." George Bernard Shaw
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result" Albert Einstein
Baiting is a provocative act used to solicit an angry, aggressive or emotional response from another individual.
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Post by jackietex on Jan 30, 2024 5:38:42 GMT
Actually he was. This came up at the time and that was when it was revealed he wore his dead son rosary beads on his wrist. Again, I back my statement with video: And a still picture: Twitter Disagree? Prove it. You really shouldn't be bitching about me not answering you, when you so often don’t answer my questions. So often. Here's just the latest you left unanswered, asked well before you asked: I took it down to the basics so you shouldn't have any trouble understanding it this time... "What if 12 people a day kept illegally entering your home, taking up residence and the police cheif wasn't enforcing the law, but said he'd make you a deal to enforce the law. What if he said he'd enforce the law once it hit an average of 8 people a day illegally entering your home and taking up residence If you said no, do your fucking job, are YOU responsible for tanking his useless "deal"?" It was, though this is a trivial thing to discuss, imo. You can just see the string from the rosary in front of Biden's cuff. |
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Post by morecowbell on Jan 30, 2024 6:07:55 GMT
Again, no, he wasn't. Again, I back my statement with video: And a still picture: Twitter Disagree? Prove it. You really shouldn't be bitching about me not answering you, when you so often don’t answer my questions. So often. Here's just the latest you left unanswered, asked well before you asked: I took it down to the basics so you shouldn't have any trouble understanding it this time... "What if 12 people a day kept illegally entering your home, taking up residence and the police cheif wasn't enforcing the law, but said he'd make you a deal to enforce the law. What if he said he'd enforce the law once it hit an average of 8 people a day illegally entering your home and taking up residence If you said no, do your fucking job, are YOU responsible for tanking his useless "deal"?" It was, though this is a trivial thing to discuss, imo. You can just see the string from the rosary in front of Biden's cuff. No, it wasn't. He was looking at his watch. I provided proof of him looking at a watch. No rosary was visible. And if he wanted to look at a rosary, he would have put it on the other wrist so he didn't look disrespectful by looking like he was looking at his watch. A rosary is more of a touch thing anyway, if he wanted comfort from it, more than likely he would have just touched it. While remaining respectful. |
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Post by morecowbell on Jan 30, 2024 6:11:02 GMT
Again, no, he wasn't. Again, I back my statement with video: And a still picture: Twitter Disagree? Prove it. You really shouldn't be bitching about me not answering you, when you so often don’t answer my questions. So often. Here's just the latest you left unanswered, asked well before you asked: I took it down to the basics so you shouldn't have any trouble understanding it this time... "What if 12 people a day kept illegally entering your home, taking up residence and the police cheif wasn't enforcing the law, but said he'd make you a deal to enforce the law. What if he said he'd enforce the law once it hit an average of 8 people a day illegally entering your home and taking up residence If you said no, do your fucking job, are YOU responsible for tanking his useless "deal"?" It was, though this is a trivial thing to discuss, imo. You can just see the string from the rosary in front of Biden's cuff. Also, it's not trivial, when aj2hall is listing all the ways Biden has empathy and listing all the ways Trump has none. It was just 1 thing in a list of Biden's lack of empathy that she forgot to include in her list making. ETA: Funny how it's never trivial for the person that started the thing you object to, just trivial if someone disagrees. |
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Post by jackietex on Jan 30, 2024 6:33:53 GMT
It was, though this is a trivial thing to discuss, imo. You can just see the string from the rosary in front of Biden's cuff. Also, it's not trivial, when aj2hall is listing all the ways Biden has empathy and listing all the ways Trump has none. It was just 1 thing in a list of Biden's lack of empathy that she forgot to include in her list making. ETA: Funny how it's never trivial for the person that started the thing you object to, just trivial if someone disagrees. I think the entire discussion of Trump versus Biden's empathy is trivial, and I believe that a man that has been known for his empathy and understanding for at least 51 years...and Trump, there isn't anything to discuss. I understand that you have strong and inflexible feelings about Biden, and I have no interest in trying to enlighten you about the truth, so don't feel like you need to address my comment. |
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Jan 30, 2024 6:43:06 GMT
Biden feels, shares and believes the words. He also likes people and has suffered the death of two children.
Trump says the words, he does not feel or believe the words. He cares for no one beyond himself, not even his children!
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Post by morecowbell on Feb 4, 2024 1:44:54 GMT
We used to have Political Parties, we now have Hate Groups. Still don't have a budget, but they are still being paid. Immigration? Maybe we should just send the Statue of Liberty back to France. I have not voted for a party, I have always voted for the person. Right now I will vote for Haley as a wright in. She's not perfect, but to me, the best candidate. I understand how you're feeling. Immigration has always been a good thing for our country. Unfortunately it's not the same as it was in the past. According to citizens, ranchers and government officials (including Democrats) right there on the border, too many coming across now are not the same as even 10 years ago. They say that those that used to come across were so extremely grateful to be here, just in their demeanor alone. They looked to help and just wanted to work to get on with their life in America. Those citizens, ranchers and government officials (including Democrats) now say, that too many of them that show up at their door or are wandering around their property/land are entitled/demanding and aggressive. They say their spouses and children are not safe outside alone anymore. LINK Heavily-armed troops in Ecuador are now going car-to-car to find gang members. Meanwhile in the US, millions of totally unvetted military-age men from these locations flood the border every year. That's not to paint all illegal crossers as dangerous. "The arrests of individuals in the United States allegedly linked to Hezbollah’s main overseas terrorist arm, and their intelligence-collection and procurement efforts, demonstrate Hezbollah’s interest in long-term contingency planning activities here in the homeland.” -FBI director Chris Wray in a congressional hearing November 15 FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are warning that terrorists are currently a "heightened threat" including at the southern border. Biden shattered the record with historic number of illegal immigrants in December Federal agents recorded 302,034 illegal alien encounters last MONTH, the highest level EVER recorded, surpassing the previous record of 269,735 that Biden set in September 2023. About 300 illegal aliens who tried to cross our border were on the terrorist watchlist. By now you've probably seen this: A large mob of illegal aliens brutally attacked two NYPD officers on Saturday near Times Square. And they all were let go. Back into our country to commit more crimes. Link |
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 4, 2024 3:00:55 GMT
We used to have Political Parties, we now have Hate Groups. Still don't have a budget, but they are still being paid. Immigration? Maybe we should just send the Statue of Liberty back to France. I have not voted for a party, I have always voted for the person. Right now I will vote for Haley as a wright in. She's not perfect, but to me, the best candidate. I understand how you're feeling. Immigration has always been a good thing for our country. Unfortunately it's not the same as it was in the past. According to citizens, ranchers and government officials (including Democrats) right there on the border, too many coming across now are not the same as even 10 years ago. They say that those that used to come across were so extremely grateful to be here, just in their demeanor alone. They looked to help and just wanted to work to get on with their life in America. Those citizens, ranchers and government officials (including Democrats) now say, that too many of them that show up at their door or are wandering around their property/land are entitled/demanding and aggressive. They say their spouses and children are not safe outside alone anymore. LINK Heavily-armed troops in Ecuador are now going car-to-car to find gang members. Meanwhile in the US, millions of totally unvetted military-age men from these locations flood the border every year. That's not to paint all illegal crossers as dangerous. "The arrests of individuals in the United States allegedly linked to Hezbollah’s main overseas terrorist arm, and their intelligence-collection and procurement efforts, demonstrate Hezbollah’s interest in long-term contingency planning activities here in the homeland.” -FBI director Chris Wray in a congressional hearing November 15 FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas are warning that terrorists are currently a "heightened threat" including at the southern border. Biden shattered the record with historic number of illegal immigrants in December Federal agents recorded 302,034 illegal alien encounters last MONTH, the highest level EVER recorded, surpassing the previous record of 269,735 that Biden set in September 2023. About 300 illegal aliens who tried to cross our border were on the terrorist watchlist. By now you've probably seen this: A large mob of illegal aliens brutally attacked two NYPD officers on Saturday near Times Square. And they all were let go. Back into our country to commit more crimes. LinkI’m not sure which is the real threat to this country, angry white men and women attacking our Capitol because they were fed a lie by the President of the United States. And when asked about this Republican lawmakers claim these folks were just doing “touristy” things. Or angry white men who get AR-15 and take them to our schools and try and slaughter as many children as they can and all the while we do nothing about these guns that have no business in our streets. And the only reason these guns are on our streets is because Republican members of Congress refuse to do anything about it. Or the leading Republican Candidate for President who has already been found he sexually assaulted a woman. Has 4 indictments pending that generated 90+ charges. Has repeatedly said what he will do as President that for all practical purposes is a genuine attack on the democracy of this country. Or some migrants who attacked NYPOs. I don’t know but it seems to me the bigger threat to this country are those who identify as Republicans. Maybe we should deport them before they DO destroy our country. |
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Feb 4, 2024 5:20:23 GMT
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Post by onelasttime on Feb 4, 2024 5:55:01 GMT
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Post by morecowbell on Feb 4, 2024 6:12:53 GMT
Being for legal immigration does not make you a racist. But thinking that it does is ignorant. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 5, 2024 21:38:03 GMT
Our choice in this election will have consequences around the world. Do we want to side with dictators like Putin and Kim Jon Un or strengthen alliances with democratic allies? www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/05/trump-world-global-reaction-tariffs/The 2024 election is shaping up to be much more than a likely rematch between President Biden and former president Donald Trump — or even as a test of their competing visions for U.S. democracy. To a greater extent than perhaps any other moment since the 1920 debate over U.S. entry into the League of Nations, this country’s role in the world will be on the ballot. At the same time, the United States faces critical global challenges in Ukraine, the Middle East, East Asia and elsewhere.
Assuming they do end up facing each other in November, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump will offer voters a stark choice between the former’s support for the network of alliances and international institutions the United States helped create after World War II and the latter’s “America First” approach. In that sense, U.S. voters will not be choosing a direction for their country alone but for the world as a whole.
The assumption underlying such institutions as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the mutual defense agreements that bind the United States with Japan and South Korea is that security is not a zero-sum proposition. By committing resources over extended periods and combining them, taking mutual advantage of differing capabilities, countries can make themselves far safer than would have been possible if they acted unilaterally or in temporary concert. Mr. Biden believes this is still a workable model, which is why he is trying to apply and expand it to deter the challenge to NATO posed by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, has repeatedly depicted security alliances not as prudent long-term investments but as free rides for allies who get U.S. protection but do not shoulder their fair share of the defense burden. This is why Mr. Trump is pushing to end America’s support for Ukraine and hinting at a separate peace of some kind with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. His campaign website promises “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”
Self-absorbed and easily swayed by honeyed words and calculated attention from autocrats such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, he inconsistently directs venom at China’s predatory trade practices and admiration for that country’s leader, Xi Jinping. This sows uncertainty not just in Taiwan but also the wider range of allies and partners that includes Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia and India. The Eurasia Group, a risk consultancy, has warned that a Trump return would raise foundational questions about America’s trustworthiness as well as “the credibility of its commitments to foreign partners, and the durability of its role as the [linchpin] of the global security order.” We wish it were exaggerating.
Part of what’s so concerning about the prospect of an isolationist second Trump presidency is that it would defy majority sentiment: Sixty-five percent of Americans want the United States to play a “leading” or “major” role in world affairs, according to the most recent Gallup Poll.
In short, U.S. foreign policy has evolved but still can rely on its time-tested essentials. Mr. Biden is far likelier to make sure of that than Mr. Trump. One way to gauge the radical changes that might lie in store is through the anticipatory words and deeds of leaders abroad. Mr. Putin shows no signs of backing down in Ukraine or negotiating peace because he obviously hopes for a better deal from Mr. Trump. Democratic leaders in Europe, by contrast, speak nervously of hedging against Trump Round 2. Whether or not he wins, Mr. Trump has already created a more dangerous world, in which the power and principles of the United States are seen not as constants but as variables. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 10, 2024 5:56:02 GMT
In the same speech to the NRA, Trump bragged that in 4 years, he did nothing about guns. Do you want a President who supports the NRA or one who is trying to do something about gun violence? A President who helped overturn Roe v Wade or one who supports abortion rights? A President willing to do something about the border or one who wants to campaign on the issue?
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 2:57:46 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 17:13:15 GMT
Being for legal immigration does not make you a racist. But thinking that it does is ignorant. This is what Trump and Miller are proposing. Tell me how this isn't racist or xenophobic. Tell me how talking about immigrants as vermin poisoning the blood of our country is not racist or xenophobic. www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.htmlFormer President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.
Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Mr. Trump is eyeing.
In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.
Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.
And Mr. Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Mr. Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.
In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description yet of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Mr. Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.
All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group that repeatedly fought the Trump administration, said the Trump team’s plans relied on “xenophobic demagoguery” that appeals to his hardest-core political base.
“Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Mr. Schulte said.
Since Mr. Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is re-elected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.
The ebbing of the Covid-19 pandemic and resumption of travel flows have helped stir a global migrant crisis, with millions of Venezuelans and Central Americans fleeing turmoil and Africans arriving in Latin American countries before continuing their journey north. Amid the record numbers of migrants at the southern border and beyond it in cities like New York and Chicago, voters are frustrated and even some Democrats are calling for tougher action against immigrants and pressuring the White House to better manage the crisis.
Mr. Trump and his advisers see the opening, and now know better how to seize it. The aides Mr. Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions — like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John F. Kelly — had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.
In a second term, Mr. Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him.
Since much of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.
The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration.
DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Mr. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.
Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Mr. Trump replaced her with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.
His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.
As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”
Mr. Trump had similarly vowed to carry out mass deportations when running for office in 2016, but the government only managed several hundred thousand removals per year under his presidency, on par with other recent administrations. If they get another opportunity, Mr. Trump and his team are determined to achieve annual numbers in the millions.
Mr. Trump’s immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much farther. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.
One example centers on expanding first-term policies aimed at keeping people out of the country. Mr. Trump plans to suspend the nation’s refugee program and once again categorically bar visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries, which President Biden called discriminatory and ended on his first day in office.
Mr. Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Mr. Miller said. For example, a second Trump administration would seek to re-establish an agreement with Mexico that asylum seekers remain there while their claims are processed. (It is not clear that Mexico would agree; a Mexican court has said that deal violated human rights.)
Mr. Trump would also push to revive “safe third country” agreements with several nations in Central America, and try to expand them to Africa, Asia and South America. Under such deals, countries agree to take would-be asylum seekers from specific other nations and let them apply for asylum there instead.
While such arrangements have traditionally only covered migrants who had previously passed through a third country, federal law does not require that limit and a second Trump administration would seek to make those deals without it, in part as a deterrent to migrants making what the Trump team views as illegitimate asylum claims.
At the same time, Mr. Miller said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would invoke the public health emergency powers law known as Title 42 to again refuse to hear any asylum claims by people arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration had internally discussed that idea early in Mr. Trump’s term, but some cabinet secretaries pushed back, arguing that there was no public health emergency that would legally justify it. The administration ultimately implemented it during the coronavirus pandemic.
Saying the idea has since gained acceptance in practice — Mr. Biden initially kept the policy — Mr. Miller said Mr. Trump would invoke Title 42, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like R.S.V. and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”
Mr. Trump and his aides have not yet said whether they would re-enact one of the most contentious deterrents to unauthorized immigration that he pursued as president: separating children from their parents, which led to trauma among migrants and difficulties in reuniting families. When pressed, Mr. Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out reviving the policy. After an outcry over the practice, Mr. Trump ended it in 2018 and a judge later blocked the government from putting it back into effect.
Soon after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president last November, he met with Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants.
In an interview, Mr. Homan recalled that in that meeting, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”
Trump advisers’ vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.
Mr. Miller cast such disruption in a favorable light.
“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” he said. “Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.”
One planned step to overcome the legal and logistical hurdles would be to significantly expand a form of fast-track deportations known as “expedited removal.” It denies undocumented immigrants the usual hearings and opportunity to file appeals, which can take months or years — especially when people are not in custody — and has led to a large backlog. A 1996 law says people can be subject to expedited removal for up to two years after arriving, but to date the executive branch has used it more cautiously, swiftly expelling people picked up near the border soon after crossing.
The Trump administration tried to expand the use of expedited removal, but a court blocked it and then the Biden team canceled the expansion. It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court will rule that it is constitutional to use the law against people who have been living for a significant period in the United States and express fear of persecution if sent home.
Mr. Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.”
The Supreme Court has upheld past uses of that law in wartime. But its text seems to require a link to the actions of a foreign government, so it is not clear whether the justices will allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity.
More broadly, Mr. Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.
To make the process of finding and deporting undocumented immigrants already living inside the country “radically more quick and efficient,” he said, the Trump team would bring in “the right kinds of attorneys and the right kinds of policy thinkers” willing to carry out such ideas.
And because of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, they plan to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.
Mr. Miller said the new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border.”
He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security. While he cautioned that there were no specific blueprints yet, he said the camps would look professional and similar to other facilities for migrants that have been built near the border.
Such camps could also enable the government to speed up the pace and volume of deportations of undocumented people who have lived in the United States for years and so are not subject to fast-track removal. If pursuing a long-shot effort to win permission to remain in the country would mean staying locked up in the interim, some may give up and voluntarily accept removal without going through the full process.
The use of these camps, Mr. Miller said, would likely be focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a longstanding court order known as the Flores settlement. So any families brought to the facilities would have to be moved in and out more quickly, he said.
The Trump administration tried to overturn the Flores settlement, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the matter before Mr. Trump’s term ended. Mr. Miller said the Trump team would try again.
To increase the number of agents available for ICE sweeps, Mr. Miller said, officials from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.
While a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids the use of the armed forces for law enforcement purposes, another law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. Mr. Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act at the border, enabling the use of federal troops to apprehend migrants, Mr. Miller said.
“Bottom line,” he said, “President Trump will do whatever it takes.” |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 17:22:25 GMT
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/20/trump-mass-deportations-immigration/Trump and allies planning militarized mass deportations, detention camps As president, Trump sought to use military planes and bases for deportation. Now, he and his allies are talking about a new effort that current and former officials warn could be impractical and dangerous. By Isaac Arnsdorf, Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey Updated February 21, 2024 at 1:58 p.m. EST|Published February 21, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EST Faced with a surge of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2018 and 2019, Donald Trump’s White House discussed ways to more aggressively deploy the resources and the might of the U.S. military.
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Aides and officials spoke privately about detaining migrants on military bases and flying them out of the country on military planes — ideas that the Pentagon headed off. Throughout his presidency, Trump himself would frequently demand to send troops to the border and catch people crossing.
“He was obsessed with having the military involved,” said a former senior administration official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.
That approach and unfinished business have taken on renewed significance and urgency as the country confronts another migrant crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border, and as Trump closes in on the Republican presidential nomination. The former president is making immigration a core campaign theme, promoting a proposal for an unprecedented deportation effort if he is returned to power.
Trump pledges that as president he would immediately launch “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As a model, he points to an Eisenhower-era program known as “Operation Wetback,” using a derogatory slur for Mexican migrants. The operation used military tactics to round up and remove migrant workers, sometimes transporting them in dangerous conditions that led to some deaths. Former administration officials and policy experts said staging an even larger operation today would face a bottleneck in detention space — a problem that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and other allies have proposed addressing by building mass deportation camps.
“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,” said Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt in a statement. She added that undocumented immigrants “should not get comfortable because very soon they will be going home.”
Trump has made similar promises and has used inflammatory smears since his 2016 campaign. But he, his aides and allies say a second turn in office would be more effective in operating the levers of the federal bureaucracy and less vulnerable to internal resistance. During his term, former officials said, Trump learned to install more officials at the Department of Homeland Security who would carry out his orders instead of trying to curb his impulses.
Throughout his current campaign, the former president has exerted his influence on the immigration policy debate on several fronts. He pressured congressional Republicans to reject a bipartisan compromise to expand enforcement funding and powers, arguing that it would give the Democrats a political victory and that it was not restrictive enough. He has also escalated his use of dehumanizing language to describe migrants, accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country” and calling the record unauthorized border crossings an “invasion,” an “open wound” and a source of imminent terrorist attacks.
But his deportation proposal is one part of his emerging platform that experts, current and former government officials and others described as especially alarming, impractical and prone to significant legal and logistical hurdles.
“You’re talking about officers in tactical gear going into communities, being videotaped in the streets, putting kids in car seats, carrying baby formula. Then what do you do with those families?” said Jason Houser, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s chief of staff from January 2022 until March 2023. “Are you going to go into neighborhoods in Philly, New York, Baltimore and start tugging people out of communities? That’s what they want. It puts law enforcement and the communities at risk.”
Reflecting on the ideas Trump and his team discussed during his presidency, Houser said, “Their ideas were psychotic.”
‘The military will be deployed’
Trump’s aides are encouraged by polls showing voters prioritizing immigration and trusting him more than President Biden on the issue. But there is some disagreement in his circles on the specifics.
While advisers agree on border security, building a wall on the southern border and deporting migrants who have committed crimes after entering the country as winning political issues, one adviser expressed concern that promising to deport massive numbers of people who haven’t been convicted of a crime could hurt Trump in a general election campaign. Trump’s language and proposals are already under heavy criticism from the Biden campaign, as well as pro-immigration and civil liberties groups.
“Trump is following the 20th century dictator’s playbook of dehumanizing vulnerable groups in order to isolate them and justify cruelty by the state,” Genevieve Nadeau, a former DHS lawyer, said in a report by the nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy. “He’s backing up his rhetoric by threatening to invoke extreme and novel legal tools to effectuate an agenda of inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen for generations. We should expect him to follow through on his pledges.”
The Trump campaign has also said he would sign an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States. The idea of challenging the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship would be sure to draw a court challenge. The proposal has been raised by Trump and Miller before, but the specific promise of an executive order indicated the campaign has put further effort into fleshing it out.
Some in the Trump campaign have tried to tamp down talk of mass deportations and have become frustrated with some outside allies, the Trump adviser said. But another person close to the campaign said Trump and his team remain in touch with Miller, who has described “large-scale raids” and “throughput facilities.” Trump advisers view Miller as the leading authority on “America First” immigration policy, and he is widely expected to reenter the West Wing if Trump wins in November.
“I don’t care what the hell happens in this world,” Miller said on a Feb. 5 podcast interview with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. “If President Trump gets reelected, the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”
Republicans frustrated with Biden have increasingly promoted the idea of militarized immigration enforcement. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers to stop crossings along the Rio Grande, where he announced plans Friday to build a military base to house the troops.
Trump and his campaign have offered few details about how he would implement his deportation operation, other than to “use all necessary federal, state, local and military resources.”
The pool of potential deportees is large. There are about 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal status, according to the most recent estimates. Nearly 7 million of those are known to ICE, which maintains a vast database of people eligible for deportation whose asylum claims and immigration cases are still pending.
A smaller subset of that caseload — about 1.3 million people — remain in the United States despite having received a deportation order from an immigration judge. These potential deportees, if taken into custody, are the easiest for the government to send home, because they have already received due process. But the government often doesn’t know where they are.
Beyond those challenges, there are other major logistical and operational obstacles to the kind of mass deportations Trump has promised. The first is available personnel: ICE only has about 6,000 deportation officers nationwide. The amount of time it takes to recruit, hire, screen and train a new deportation officer is about two years, according to current and former ICE officials.
Detention space is also squeezed. The Biden administration is using about 38,000 beds at immigration jails and other facilities that hold migrants awaiting deportation. During the Trump years, the number exceeded 50,000, but never reached the kinds of capacity levels necessary for the kind of mega-deportation system Trump envisions.
Some ICE officials said the agency could find more available beds in county jails. But Trump surrogates have gone further, suggesting they would put migrants in “camps” or “tents.”
“So you go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids, you have to have somewhere to put them,” Miller said in a November podcast interview with Kirk. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly — probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets — and that’s how you’re able to scale.”
Miller also suggested using National Guard troops, state police and other federal law enforcement agencies as force multipliers, even sending National Guard troops from Republican-led states into neighboring states governed by Democrats. “If you’re going to go into an unfriendly state like Maryland, well, they would just be Virginia doing the arrest in Maryland,” he said in the November podcast interview.
Such street-level roundups are so resource-intensive that many ICE officials view them as impractical. The operations require officers to locate migrants and surveil them to determine a safe opportunity to make an arrest. Such arrests often depend on the cooperation of local police.
“The most crucial part of any law enforcement effort is not to undermine popular support for that effort, and that means doing it legally, doing it respectfully and doing it properly,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who is now at the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks tighter restrictions.
To arrest and deport families with children, the preparations are even more time-consuming. An operation targeting 20 to 30 families for arrest takes two to three weeks of planning, said Houser, the former ICE chief of staff. For ICE to reach a target of 300,000 to 500,000 deportations per year — a far more modest goal than Trump’s — Houser said the agency would need two to three times as many deportation officers as ICE has.
“You’re talking about building a major logistics apparatus that would still have to meet court and legal requirements for health care and child care,” he said.
ICE officers and staff are burned out by the pace and intensity of their work over the past several years, according to a veteran DHS official who was not authorized to speak to reporters. For other law enforcement agencies, the drain on their resources would come at the expense of other legitimate priorities, the former DHS official said, and the operation would have to be continuous to deter new arrivals.
“It feels shortsighted, stupid and an enormous waste of money,” the official said.
Another problem is so-called “recalcitrant countries” that limit or refuse to take back deportees. Nations such as Venezuela and Cuba are already under U.S. economic sanctions, leaving Washington with reduced leverage to compel them to take more deportation flights.
Even other nations that remain U.S. allies in Latin America set conditions on the number of flights and deportees they’re willing to accept. Passenger manifests have to be sent several days in advance. It’s not as simple as loading hundreds of people into a military transport plane and dropping them off wherever the president wants.
A former senior administration official said Trump would be emboldened in a second term and insist on moving faster than his first administration did. The former president has repeatedly suggested he would act as a “dictator” on “day one” to close the border — sometimes adding that he made this comment in jest.
“We will do that immediately,” Trump said in a campaign video last year. “This invasion will not stand.”
‘I know it sounds harsh’
Trump’s and Miller’s determination to carry out mass deportations in a second term grew out of frustration with setbacks to their plans while Trump was in power.
In Trump’s first month as president, in 2017, a draft memo obtained by the Associated Press proposed deploying as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to arrest undocumented immigrants throughout the interior of the country. The memo was never implemented, but Trump did sign an executive order directing ICE to detain more unauthorized immigrants, including pregnant women and people without criminal records.
Trump pledged to immediately deport 2 million to 3 million people after his 2016 win but never came close to hitting those targets. At his administration’s high-water mark in 2019, ICE carried out 267,258 deportations and returns, Department of Homeland Security data show.
Trump officials likened the approach to “taking the shackles off,” but it generated a backlash that drove more cities and jurisdictions to adopt sanctuary policies limiting their cooperation with ICE. ICE officials have long preferred to take people into custody from a secure setting such as a jail to avoid the complex planning and adverse publicity of arrests in homes, workplaces or streets.
As the number of people in ICE custody jumped 22 percent in Trump’s first two years, the DHS inspector general uncovered “egregious violations of detention standards,” including inadequate medical care, expired food, lack of recreation, moldy bathrooms and inadequate clothing and hygiene supplies. A separate inspector general’s investigation found “dangerous overcrowding” in an El Paso facility, where a cell built for 25 people held 155.
In June 2018, reporters and human rights activists toured a facility in McAllen, Tex., where children slept under foil sheets surrounded by chain-link fencing, after DHS acknowledged separating children from their parents at the border. Public outrage over an audio clip of a sobbing child forced Trump to halt the practice. DHS later identified 4,227 separated children, 3,147 of whom were reunited with their parent as of November 2023.
Asked in 2023 whether he might reimpose family separation as president, Trump declined to rule it out and defended the policy. “I know it sounds harsh,” he said in a CNN town hall. “When you say to a family that if you come we’re going to break you up, they don’t come. And we can’t afford to have any more.”
A migrant child looks out the window as protesters try to block a bus carrying migrant children out of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention center on June 23, 2018, in McAllen, Tex. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
In 2019, Trump ordered pre-dawn raids targeting 2,000 families in 10 cities who had received deportation orders, over concerns from top DHS officials about lack of preparation and the effect on children. The administration also changed immigration enforcement rules to expedite deportations of people who had been in the country for less than two years, making it possible to remove them without a hearing in front of an immigration judge.
“You think other countries have judges that give them trials?” Trump said in public remarks in 2018.
As the president’s top adviser on immigration matters, Miller advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act to mobilize the Department of Defense, according to the former officials. Pentagon officials balked at the idea of using military bases and planes, current and former officials recalled, citing concerns of getting mired in an open-ended commitment or compromising troop readiness.
The president himself would often demand to send troops to block the border, according to the former officials. Aides would explain to Trump the lack of budget or legal authority to use the military for immigration, including a law against using the military for domestic law enforcement, according to former national security adviser John Bolton.
“He couldn’t care less,” Bolton said.
Trump was generally more focused on his signature campaign promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico, according to former officials.
“The pressure from the White House was always more about the wall,” a former senior DHS official said. “We didn’t really get significant pressure in the first term on deportations.”
Still, Trump would often say he wanted more deportations and listened to immigration hard-liners, led by Miller, a former senior administration official said. The biggest deterrent, the official said, was limited space to house people while they were awaiting a court proceeding and not enough judges to move the proceedings quickly.
“Every time the hard-liners would say, ‘we need to start arresting them,’ I would say — as I said 50 times — in order to do this, we have to make all these things happen. That was the end of any conversation,” the former senior administration official said. “It’s not an overnight thing.”
Miller reached the conclusion that aggressive immigration enforcement had to be implemented as quickly as possible, without losing time by considering litigation risks, a former DHS official said. During Trump’s first term, immigration advocates and civil liberties groups repeatedly succeeded in halting or narrowing Trump’s policies through court challenges, and he could face similar challenges to a mass deportation operation.
Trump has specifically cited the Eisenhower example and defended its legacy. When CNN’s Jake Tapper noted in 2016 that many people considered it a “shameful chapter in American history,” Trump responded: “Some people do, and some people think it was a very effective chapter. … It was very successful, everyone said. So I mean, that’s the way it is.”
Press reports described the operation in the summer of 1954 as “an all-out war” with a wire-fenced “concentration camp” from which Mexicans were “herded aboard trains.” Others were forcibly marched through miles of rattlesnake-infested deserts or had their heads shaved — ostensibly for hygienic reasons but widely viewed as humiliating, according to historian Juan R. Garcia’s definitive book on the subject. The Red Cross intervened after many braceros, or temporary agricultural workers and laborers, were stranded in the desert, and 88 died of sunstroke, according to Columbia University historian Mae Ngai.
The deportations also used planes, buses and ships, including one built for up to 90 people that was crowded with 500, leading one lawmaker to compare it to a “penal ship.” The use of ships stopped after seven migrants drowned while trying to escape.
The Eisenhower effort “was a one-off,” Ngai said. Trump and his allies “are trying to figure out a way to do that in a sustained way."
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Post by iamkristinl16 on Feb 23, 2024 17:36:11 GMT
Ah I said what I thought about immigration reform in another post, but here it is. What you are doing are what ifs. What I want is genuine immigration reform and I want Congress to do their fucking job to come up with said immigration reform. As pointed out in another post President Obama tried to get immigration reform, couldn’t get it, wanted to try and offer some protection to the Dreamers and ended up doing it by executive order. It’s been challenged left and right that would not have happened if Congress did their fucking job and written a new bill providing the reforms that are needed as well offering protection to these kids. The answer…. “There are two options. Option #1 Let President Biden do stuff by Executive Order. I have said why I don’t support that. You can read it in the other post because I’m not going to repeat it here. Option #2 Which I support. Have Congress do what they are elected to do and that is create legislation to deal with problems in this country. The Senators have done just that. However the House Republicans have said no way, let the President do it by executive order. And here’s why they are saying that. There is no way in hell the President can adequately address all the immigration issues that need to be addressed by Executive Order. And House Republicans know this which means they can continue to use immigration as a weapon against the President and Democrats. Nor do they want any legislation because that would be a combined effort which means they couldn’t seriously criticize it because they help create it. As to the Republicans wanting to sink any legislation, there is a post of trump saying just that. So based on your relentless harping about that “compassion” statement and that trump really meant what he said, you have to believe what he said in the post that I posted in one of the threads that it was ok to blame him for the Republicans sinking immigration reform legislation . That is my opinion on the subject and I’m more than comfortable with it. Agree or disagree that is your choice.” No, I'm not doing "what ifs". Im talking about what IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING. You asked "Tell me again how the Republicans are not trying to tank any immigration reform legislation being passed before the election." ...and I simply answered that question by trying to get you to put yourself in their shoes. Biden's DECEMBER (1 single month) numbers are almost identical to the numbers of the entire 2017 fiscal year. 🤯 Biden Shatters Record With Historic Number Of Illegal Alien Encounters In December “Today’s historical border numbers confirm what we already know. The Biden Admin is not using existing authority to secure the border. This continues to be a crisis by design, it’s overwhelming Border Patrol, and overrunning American communities.” -Former Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad WolfBiden is doing it on purpose! "The same authority Biden used to reverse almost every Trump policy at the border — including terminating the national emergency declaration at the border upon taking office — can be used to make significant changes." Bill Melugin Do you ever stop to consider why more people are coming now than in the past? What do you think Biden is doing that is different than other presidents? Do you think that constant comments from you and your party saying that the border is "Wide open" has had an impact (even though that ISN'T TRUE)? What is going on in their home countries that is leading them to leave (that has little to nothing to do with the US)? |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 14:41:19 GMT
I know unprecedented has been overused in the last couple of years. But, the lack of support for Trump from his former staff is historic, telling and unprecedented.
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 14:58:36 GMT
There are a million reasons why Trump is unfit for office. His support for Putin is one of the biggest and should be disqualifying.
Compare that to President Biden
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 15:00:10 GMT
President Biden at last night’s Gridiron dinner: “The big news this week is two candidates clinched their parties’ nomination for president. One candidate is too old, mentally unfit to be president: The other’s me.”
“You know he ain’t the same guy that I beat in 2020…But don’t tell him. He thinks he’s running against Barack Obama.”www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2024/03/17/biden-trump-gridiron-dinner-washington/Biden needles Trump on age, mental fitness, finances at D.C. dinner At the annual white-tie Gridiron event, jokes about Jan. 6 and a possible Trump return belied a Washington on edge |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 16:08:27 GMT
Things to expect from a 2nd Biden term:
- no unhinged calls for bloodbaths and political violence
- no insane appeals to SCOTUS for absolute immunity
- no unabashed appeasement of Vladimir Putin
- no regular attacks on our Constitution, democratic institutions, women, people of color, LGBTQ, law enforcement, prosecutors, the judiciary, court staff, media…
- no constant churn of cabinet members and WH staff
- no daily drama and chaos
Keep the rational adults in charge of America.
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 16:18:23 GMT
There's a very clear picture of the future with each candidate www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/opinion/columnists/trump-biden-rematch.htmlOPINION JAMELLE BOUIE Don’t Think of It as a Contest Between Biden and Trump March 15, 2024 It’s official — we have a rematch.
This week, both Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially secured the delegates needed to win renomination in their respective primaries. This will be the first contest since the 1892 race between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland where a former challenger, now incumbent, faces off against a former incumbent, now challenger, for a second term in the White House. Cleveland won his challenge, but this does not tell us anything about our situation.
Truth be told, there is a pervasive sense floating around this election that there is nothing new to discuss — that there’s nothing new to learn about Biden and certainly nothing new to learn about Trump.
But while it’s fair to say that we already know quite a bit about the two men — their strengths and weaknesses, their perspectives and views, the character of their administrations and their records while in office — there is still a great deal to say about what they intend to do with another four years in the White House.
Both Trump and Biden have far-reaching plans for the country, either one of which would transform the United States. Of course, one of those transformations would be for the worst, the other for the better.
Let’s start with the worst. We already know that Donald Trump’s main targets for his second term are American democracy and the American constitutional order. For Trump, the basics of American governance — separation of powers, an independent civil service and the popular selection of elected officials — are a direct obstacle to his desire to protect himself, enrich himself and extend his personalized rule as far over the country as possible.
My colleague Carlos Lozada has already taken a deep dive into Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term. The overall thrust of the “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” is an authoritarian remodeling of the executive branch, designed around Trump. “It calls for a relentless politicizing of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on overtly ideological grounds,” writes Lozada, who also notes that the Heritage vision “portrays the president as the personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment to conservative governance.”
In practice, one of the things this would mean is that Trump would be empowered to use the Department of Justice to investigate his political enemies, or use the Internal Revenue Service to harass them with audits and other forms of heightened scrutiny.
But a second Trump term wouldn’t just be about the abuse of power, the erosion of checks and balances and the elevation of assorted hacks and apparatchiks into positions of real authority. It would also be about the concerted effort to make the federal government a vehicle for the upward distribution of wealth.
Both Trump and Republicans in Congress want to extend his 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $3.3 trillion, the large majority of which would benefit the highest income earners. Trump also hopes to slash the corporate tax rate, reducing the government’s revenue by an additional $522 billion. To pay for this, both Trump and Republicans would almost certainly take an ax to the social safety net, targeting Medicaid, food stamps and other programs for low-income and working Americans. Trump has even said he is open to cutting Medicare and Social Security, a move that might be necessary if Republicans manage to starve the federal government of nearly $4 trillion in taxes.
We should also expect a second Trump administration to resume the effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as well as try to unravel as much of the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act as possible.
Biden wants something very different for the country. His first goal, to start, is to preserve and defend the American constitutional order. He would not subvert American democracy to make himself a strongman along the lines of Viktor Orban, who recently met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
What Biden would try to do, if his proposed budget is any indication, is reinvigorate the social insurance state. His proposal, released on Monday, calls for about $5 trillion in new taxes on corporations and the wealthy over the next decade. This would pay for, among other things: a plan to extend the fiscal solvency of Medicare, a plan to restore the expanded child tax credit enacted in the American Rescue Plan at the start of his administration, a plan to guarantee low-cost, early child care to most families, and a plan to expand health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In short, Biden hopes to make good on longstanding Democratic priorities.
There is a larger point that flows from this capsule summary of each candidate’s priorities. Americans are accustomed to thinking of their presidential elections as a battle of personalities, a framework that is only encouraged by the candidate-centric nature of the American political system as well as the way that our media reports on elections. Even the way that most Americans think about their country’s history, always focused so intently on whoever occupies the White House in a given moment, works to reinforce this notion that presidential elections are mostly about the people and personalities involved.
Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.
The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.
And if what Trump wants tells us anything, it’s that the actual goal of the Trump coalition is not to govern the country, but to rule over others. |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 17:00:34 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 17, 2024 22:49:03 GMT
Trump is really just projecting when he falsely claims that if he loses, we won't have another election. The reality is that if Trump wins, we will have an authoritarian dictatorship and 2024 will be our last election. A vote for Trump is a vote for the end of democracy. last election |
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Post by aj2hall on Mar 18, 2024 21:21:49 GMT
On reproductive rights, the choice is clear. A vote for President Biden is a vote to protect them. A vote for Trump is at minimum, a 16 week abortion ban and possibly, a more restrictive one. reproductive rights |
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it this time...
