We Resist: Day 516

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, June 19, 2018
a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Earlier today by me: Happy Juneteenth! and Trump's Sadistic Nativism Must Be Stopped.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; dehumanization; eliminationism; child abuse.]


Meanwhile, in Florida...


Amanda Holpuch at the Guardian: Families Divided at the Border: 'The Most Horrific Immigration Policy I've Ever Seen'.
Janet Gwilym, managing attorney for the Seattle branch of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), an advocacy group for unaccompanied immigrant children, said children aged 12 to 17 had been comforting toddlers who, like them, had just been taken from their parents. She said children had said they were told by immigration officials that they would see their parents again in a few minutes but hadn't seen them for months.

...Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, filed a class-action lawsuit in March against the Trump administration's family separation practice after meeting with a Congolese woman who hadn't seen her seven-year-old daughter for four months. She and her child were reunited after Gelernt filed a lawsuit on their behalf.

"This is as shocking an immigration policy as we've seen from this Trump administration, but frankly, I've been doing this work for approaching three decades, and this is the most horrific immigration policy I have ever seen," Gelernt said.

Gelernt said the detained parents he had been speaking with were afraid to ask immigration agents too much about their children for fear their children would face retaliation.

...Megan McKenna, KIND's senior director of communications and community engagement said KIND was advocating on behalf of a two-year-old who was separated from her father in March. The father was deported within a month, but as of 12 June, the girl was still in the custody of the U.S. government.

"The consequences in terms of human suffering can't be overestimated," McKenna said.
And let's be abundantly fucking clear about this: The vast majority of people being harmed by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy are not violent gang members who are crossing the border in search of innocent Americans to wantonly kill. The vast majority of people are seeking asylum from violence.

Patrick Timmons at the Guardian: Migrant Parents Separated from Children: 'We Came Because We Didn't Want to Be Killed'.
After sentencing Goulart do Nascimiento to time served for unlawful entry, the magistrate judge Miguel Torres asked him if he wanted to say anything to the court.

"I decided to come to the United States with my wife and two children because if I stayed in Brazil they would kill my entire family," he told Torres, who looked on with dismay.

..."I wanted to go file a complaint against a drug house in my neighborhood," he said. "So I went to the police station to complain about this drug trafficking spot and they told me if I filed a complaint I would be killed. That's when I decided to flee with my wife and children to the United States. I learned yesterday they killed my landlord because he helped us flee to the United States."

"Please forgive me. I came with my entire family because I did not want us to be killed."

...On that day, Juan Francisco Fuentes Castro, 49, was also in the courtroom. Border patrol agents had apprehended him and his two daughters — one recently turned 18, the other 16 — at about 9.30 at night on 1 June. Court documents show the border patrol agent "noticed that the subjects' clothing, from the knees to their feet, was wet." The Salvadoran family had waded the river to enter the United States from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Through a Spanish interpreter, Fuentes Castro implored the court to forgive him. "I felt powerless. El Salvador is going through a terrible moment. The only thing I could think is I had to get my children out of there. I am very sorry."

...Elizabeth González Juárez knows where her daughter is. She had pleaded guilty and been sentenced when the judge asked her if she had anything she wanted to tell the court. A single 30-year-old mother from Guanajuato, Mexico, she said she came to the U.S. because she wanted to protect her three-year-old daughter from her violent father, a drug dealer, who had abused González and her daughter. She told the court she was trying to get to her mother, who lived in Fort Worth, Texas.

Her defense attorney, the federal public defender Darren Ligon, said his client's boyfriend was a gang member in Ciudad Juárez.

"The terrible thing is that the thing my client was attempting most to avoid has actually happened," he said. "Immigration authorities handed her daughter back over to the abusive father at the international bridge. They contacted him in Juárez and he came to pick up his daughter."
Sob. I honestly don't even know what to do other than scream at people with far more influence than I have to do whatever they can to get Trump removed swiftly from office, because there is no convincing him to stop harming children, when harming children he views as "an infestation" is a feature of his immigration agenda, not a bug.

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Note also that the suggestion outrage "plays into their hands" is a narrative deployed in an attempt to deaden resistance. Ignore it. Resist as tenaciously and as loudly as you can.

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Philip Bump at the Washington Post: At Least Six People Close to Trump Almost Certainly Knew About Offers from Russians of Dirt on Clinton. "So we are confident the following people were offered or told about information allegedly incriminating Clinton: George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Michael Caputo, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. It is possible that the following other people knew about or received similar offers, too: Stephen Miller, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon (if Page was offered dirt), and Donald Trump. Trump's argument has long been that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. That claim increasingly depends on how one defines 'collusion.'"

Hmm. Does this count?


Meanwhile, the collusion between the Republican Party and Russia predates Trump significantly (which is further evidence of my argument that the Trump presidency is not an outlier of the GOP, but its inevitable endgame):


[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Lauren Said-Moorhouse at CNN: Russia May Have Upgraded Nuclear Bunker in Kaliningrad, Report Says. "Russia may have significantly modernized a nuclear weapons storage bunker in Kaliningrad, a sensitive exclave of Russian territory sandwiched between Poland and the Baltics, as tensions between Russia and the West continue to rise, according to a new report. On Monday, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) published aerial photographs that the group says show the facility in the Baltic outpost has been under major renovation since 2016. FAS said the images document refurbishments at the site back in 2016, when one of three underground bunkers at the location was excavated and deepened before it appeared to have been covered over in recent months, 'presumably to return (to) operational status soon.'"

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Today in possible constitutional crises...


I'm guessing House Republicans will prevent Trump from having to defy Congress, but we'll see.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
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