Trump Lambasting Diverse Congress People

[Darth Wedgius]

The roots of this go even deeper. Obama had these camps. Who knew he was secretly fascist?

[LittleRaven]

ICE comes off less like the Gestapo and more like an incompetent enforcement agency that's ill equipped to handle what the presidential administration urgently put into action so that he could retain his constituency for 2020.

That's part of it, but only part. The bigger problem is that what ICE is trying to do now is not really what ICE was created to do, and Congress has been paralyzed for over 2 decades on the subject of immigration, so everything is increasingly antiquated.

ICE is very, VERY good at processing young people from Mexico. They can do this very quickly and efficiently. They have lots of Spanish speaking personnel, they have excellent contacts and lines of communication with their Mexican counterparts so they can quickly verify anyone's story, and we have a well established logistics train that can easily deport people that need to be deported with minimal fuss and cost.

ICE is not particularly well suited to processing entire families from deep in South America. A lot of these people don't speak Spanish, or English, or anything else that anyone here speaks. We don't have a great contacts with officials in Guyana, so trying to figure out who does and doesn't qualify for asylum is hard and takes a long time. People who are travelling together are sometimes family....sometimes not, and handling minors is always fraught with peril. And there's a LOT of people coming over. A LOT. The system is just not built to handle this, and it shows.

And politics is making all of this even harder. Neither side wants to be perceived as giving the other any kind of win, which means we get a lot of pissing matches, but the bigger problem is that this is actually a really difficult issue to address, and for the last 20 years, it has burned every single politician that has made a reasonable attempt to offer a real solution - so nobody want to do THAT anymore. Democrats are happy to get outraged at the camps....but they don't really have a good plan for doing anything else, which is why Obama had camps too. Granted, Obama's policies were a good deal more forgiving than Trump's...but then again, Obama's policies are probably a good part of the reason we HAVE Trump now. Republicans are happy to blow dog whistles about immigrants coming over the border to do us harm, but none of them really want to close the border either...we kind of need the labor.

So nobody does anything, everyone gets more upset and everything just gets worse.

[Yukaphile]

@Darth Wedgius It is a well known fact Obama inherited most of Bush's messes to the point he could never be his own president, given how he was completely hamstrung by Congress. I agree, I don't think Obama was right to continue it either, and I won't excuse that. With that said, we live in a propaganda era, so both sides are gonna lie to paint theirs as superior and the other as an enemy. So how knows how much of what went on is a result of Trump's dictates once he took over? I can't say for sure. I know you'll pull the same old song and dance about "assumptions," but in this case, we literally can't say for sure. It's why I distrust everything I see. So yeah, ICE was started under Bush. Oh, and those vigilante border thugs Sanders supported? Also during the Bush era. When people were so disgusted at how vulnerable we felt in a post-9/11 world as the economy got worse, they were looking for somebody, ANYONE to blame, and so blamed people of color. Muslims, illegal immigrants, various types of people except those truly guilty. I see ICE as the end result of something that has just gotten worse over time. Also, ditto on you, Raven. Obama strikes me as the kind of guy who would be like a kind slave owner or somebody who knew of the camps, but tried to do what good they could within a corrupt system. Bush was that incompetent leader who started it. Trump is not only extremely incompetent, he's also extremely racist and xenophobic (his cries that the aliens are storming the border "coming for our land and our women!"). There's no way he's gonna care about improving conditions.

[LittleRaven]

Obama strikes me as the kind of guy who would be like a kind slave owner or somebody who knew of the camps, but tried to do what good they could within a corrupt system. Bush was that incompetent leader who started it.

Bush can be blamed for much, but not really this. The "camps" were started under Obama, and are the result of changes in who is trying enter the country and how they are trying to do it rather than who is charge. ICE was set up to deal with young workers trying to slip over the border from Mexico. It wasn't created with the idea that we would get massive numbers of non-workers from much farther away trying to claim asylum, and Congress hasn't done anything on the issue for almost 2 decades.

It's a mess.

[LittleRaven]

Anyway, a little bit closer to the original topic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/send-her-back-trump-supporters-his-nc-rally/594268

(I think the URL tag is still out of whack, so just copy and paste the link.)

In the heavy, humid hours, I walked up and down the line winding through a parking lot at East Carolina University to interview some two dozen people who wanted to see the president. Many didn’t make it inside. About 90 minutes before Donald Trump took the stage, police announced that the 8,000-person basketball arena was full and those still waiting would have to watch on an oversize TV monitor set up outside. Rather than head home, they stuck around for a tailgate party of sorts.

...

The event itself would soon turn into one of the darkest of Trump’s political career, with the president road testing a new enemy and eliciting from the crowd a fresh, frenzied three-word chant: “Send her back!” But even before he appeared, this week in American politics had been a convulsive one. Trump tweeted racist attacks on four Democratic congresswomen of color—including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, the target of “Send her back!”—and the House, in turn, rebuked the president in a party-line vote.

...

Talking with the rallygoers, I couldn’t find one who faulted Trump for demonizing the freshman representatives, all four of whom are American citizens, calling on them to leave the United States and return to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few conceded that Trump occasionally fires off an inappropriate tweet, but said his accomplishments in office overshadow any offense. If anything, they said, his language springs from an authenticity they find refreshing. None of the people I spoke with considered his comments about the congresswomen racist.

Read the whole thing. And take note of the pictures. There are young people. Black people. Recent immigrants.

Democrats need to be very careful in 2020. Trump is an incumbent president with a good economy. That's a recipe for victory right out the gate. Granted, he's also Trump, so normal rules don't apply...but he will not be easy to dislodge.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Obama strikes me as the kind of guy who would be like a kind slave owner or somebody who knew of the camps, but tried to do what good they could within a corrupt system. Bush was that incompetent leader who started it.

Bush can be blamed for much, but not really this. The "camps" were started under Obama, and are the result of changes in who is trying enter the country and how they are trying to do it rather than who is charge. ICE was set up to deal with young workers trying to slip over the border from Mexico. It wasn't created with the idea that we would get massive numbers of non-workers from much farther away trying to claim asylum, and Congress hasn't done anything on the issue for almost 2 decades.

It's a mess.

That was my first thought when reading Yuka's first sentence . Just that illegal immigration doesn't really seem like something that would simply be a direct result of the Bush administration's policies. I mean it's possible, but I doubt it.

Anyways, it is kinda funny how AOC started getting flak for not criticizing the Obama administration, but that was arguably before her time. Calling her out for hypocrisy on the matter seems more like political squabbling. Though really, if it was a problem then as much as it is now, then I don't see a reason to not protest this endeavor.

[Darth Wedgius]

Yukaphile, your response can be divided into:
1)things that are factually wrong
2)things that are purely your supposition
3)who was president when the Minutemen started.

[Yukaphile]

1) Yeah, I'm not perfect. I'm gonna make mistakes like everyone else.
2) And yet, can you blame me for being so paranoid of everything I see in a world where creating fakes is getting easier and easier? It's probably why the Flat Earth belief is gaining such steam.
3) Well, I think Bush was a better person than Trump was, but I think he was a worse leader. That's my feeling.

And yeah, I can agree it's a mess. I've said before I'm sympathetic to both sides of the argument on immigration, on the left's view of it being a humanitarian issue and the right-wingers seeing it as more of a law and order type situation. Both views do have valid weight, definitely. Problem is left vs. right and even the more hard-line elements of the left and right themselves now have been divided into tribes who hate each other's guts and just want to destroy each other. Such is the nature of a post-modern hyperpolarized world.

[CmdrKing]

Without looking it up, the camps under Obama were not dissimilar to the facilities in Canada mentioned way upthread. Deeply unethical, needs a better solution post-haste, but not "sweet mother of fuck they want to kill these people" as they are now. And at the time I remember some people raising alarms, and agreeing they were a really bad idea, but not in a "scream at people over the internet" way. More a "hello liberal friends so like this is really bad and maybe we need someone more progressive than Obama yeah?" kinda way.
God I had so many arguments I wanted to have with liberal friends under a Clinton administration.

Anyway, I do suspect that the Trump Base has shrunk marginally from the actual people who voted for him in 2016. The trouble is I think all that shrinkage occurred in the first six months or so, when even his earliest actions as president suggested he was going to act on all of his most outlandish, racist promises while otherwise catering to the Republican donor base exactly as much as any other Republican. The small fraction who voted for him out of genuine belief (or at least genuine delusion) he would shake things up and all his talk was just talk splintered off.

Now the good news is that only has to be about 150,000 people spread across 3 states to flip the 2016 map. The bad news is we don't have any accurate way to gauge how much damage to voting rights has occurred during Trump's term. If we suppose it's a wash between the handful of people he's actually offended and people who've been suspiciously wiped from the voter rolls, then there's the same basic options there always are.
1) Convince the ~4% of voters who are Actual Swing Voters that everything is on fire and maybe it's okay to NOT just kneejerk reelect whoever this time.
2) Magically shock a percent or two of the Trump Base into actually asking the fundamental question of humanity: Am I The Asshole?
3) Register the FUCK out of everyone else, get bussing to the polls organzie, the whole shebang

Now 3 is the one that actually works, but of course if you're not on the ground in specific populated areas all you can really do is send money to those who are (unless your local ground organizations actually put out calls for people of course, but it's pretty rare they'd reach outside the immediate area). And if people are actually fired up and motivated "send money" is a bit... anticlimatic. But arguing on the internet? well it's not THAT much less effective than anything else for swaying people.

[Yukaphile]

Gotta agree with CmdrKing here. It was a situation slowly getting worse over time. But Trump... he flat-out said they're drug-dealers and rapists, talking with the very air they are coming over and "contaminating" our "culture," the mostly ethnocentric white man's patriarchy he subscribes to, thus, do you really trust him to wanna help these people be comfortable until they are sent back?