A Complete Breakdown Of Donald Trump’s 72nd Unpresidented Week As POTUS
By: Ahmed Baba
Tags: Politics, Unpresidented, Donald Trump, Government, Journalism

Before we dive into what we’ve learned about the detention centers immigrant children are being held in, let’s make one thing clear: The inhumane policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border (who are systematically prosecuted) is a Trump administration policy, not Democratic legislation. The President could end this right now, but instead, he is lying about who is responsible for it.

Now, let’s begin. NBC News reported that the U.S. is running out of room to house the children who are being separated from their parents at the border, and they are being placed into holding cells that don’t have adequate medical resources:

Border agents and child welfare workers are running out of space to shelter children who have been separated from their parents at the U.S. border as part of the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy, according to two U.S. officials and a document obtained by NBC News. As of Sunday, nearly 300 of the 550 children currently in custody at U.S. border stations had spent more than 72 hours there, the time limit for immigrants of any age to be held in the government’s temporary facilities. Almost half of those 300 children are younger than 12, according to the document, meaning they are classified by the Department of Homeland Security as “tender age children.”

The report goes on to say:

The overstays at border stations are a result of a backlog at U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency responsible for sheltering migrant children longer term and matching them with relatives or foster parents in the U.S. The agency’s Administration for Children and Families has 11,200 unaccompanied children in its care and takes 45 days on average to place a child with a sponsor, according to a spokesperson.

There are reports of children as young as 53 weeks old being taken. Once the kids are placed with sponsors, they are sometimes moved to different states, leaving the parents in the dark about their whereabouts.

The administration implemented this policy as a deterrent. On May 7, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an order, which DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen implemented, that requires all undocumented immigrants crossing the border be referred for criminal prosecution…including migrants seeking asylum from violence.

The move would also mean that even if immigrants caught at the border illegally have valid asylum claims, they could still end up with federal criminal convictions on their record regardless of whether a judge eventually finds they have a right to live and stay in the US.

Many of these migrants are asylum seekers, fleeing violence and cruelty from Central America only to be welcomed by more cruelty from the country that has “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” enshrined on its Statue of Liberty. NBC News reported:

From October 2017 to mid-April, before the new prosecution strategy officially went into effect, more than 700 children were reportedly separated from their parents at the border.

In spite of the fact this is his administration’s policy, President Trump continues to falsely blame Democrats.

While Trump tries to cast blame on them, Democrats are trying to expose this horrific policy. Senator Merkley (D-OR), who wasn’t allowed to enter a Texas detention facility and had the police called on him, spoke about what he witnessed.

The United Nations has condemned this as an illegal human rights violation.

This policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it comes from a President who has made the dehumanization of Latino immigrants central to his political platform. Last month, President Trump said of unaccompanied minors who are crossing the border: “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.” Trump said this in spite of the fact that only 56 out of 250,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended by border patrol were suspected or confirmed to have gang ties.

Also last month, President Trump once again conflated MS-13 with Latino immigrants, calling them “animals.” This fear-mongering rhetoric goes back years. But as we can see, this dehumanization has moved far beyond rhetoric and has gone even further than the inhumane ICE raids we’ve seen.

Imagine for a moment you are a young immigrant mother fleeing Guatemala. As you join a caravan of asylum seekers heading towards the United States, you begin to hear about the President of the United States tweeting negative things about your initiative. You keep marching onward. You then hear the President call you an animal. You keep marching onward because you and your child’s safety are too important. You finally arrive at the border, and rather than being welcomed and treated with dignity, your child is ripped from your arms without explanation and you are put in shackles.

And if you put yourself in the child’s shoes, you are put into a detention facility and then flown to a different state, still with no explanation as to what is happening to your parent.

This is not America.

America has done unconscionable things in the past from slavery to Japanese internment camps to unjustified wars, but we must learn from that historical indecency, not embrace it.

As I’ve said before, the beauty of America is that despite who we were in the past or who we are today, we as a people have the power to choose who we will be tomorrow.

We will not stop reporting on this story until this inhumane policy ends.

Meanwhile…

President Vladimir Putin bragged about his close relationship with President Trump and said: “we regularly talk over the phone.” Important to note, Putin just made his first big trip abroad since “winning” re-election and has been trying to assure Russians that he and Trump do in fact have a good relationship in spite of Trump sending weapons to Ukraine and the new sanctions.

As we know, President Trump blames much of his Russia investigation woes not on the fact his campaign had contacts with Russians, but on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal. He criticized him again on Twitter.

Now, let’s put Trump’s above statement in context.

Jeff Sessions was nominated for Attorney General in November 2016…that was before the public was aware the Russia investigation even existed and before FBI Director James Comey revealed the Trump campaign was a subject of the investigation.

So, what President Trump is essentially saying is that he wouldn’t have nominated Sessions for Attorney General if he knew he wouldn’t protect him from an investigation the public didn’t know existed yet?

If President Trump’s claim is true, it appears that Trump was aware there was underlying wrongdoing in his campaign that he expected Sessions to cover up. Otherwise, his claim wouldn’t make sense.

Read our rundown of the Sessions-Trump feud here.

Politico reported:

Mitch McConnell is canceling all but a week of the Senate’s traditional August recess, hoping to keep vulnerable Democrats off the campaign trail and confirm as many of President Donald Trump’s judicial and executive branch nominees as possible.

Buzzfeed News reported:

All parties involved in Summer Zervos’s defamation lawsuit against Donald Trump — including the president himself — should be deposed by Jan. 31, 2019, a New York judge said Tuesday. Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice who had made public accusations against Trump during the campaign about “unwanted sexual misconduct,” sued him after he said “these allegations are 100% false” and began calling her and others “phony people coming up with phony allegations,” among other statements.

Historical Context: It was the Paula Jones sexual harassment case that garnered Bill Clinton’s deposition, which ended in a perjury/obstruction of justice impeachment referral from Independent Counsel Ken Starr.

President Trump canceled the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles White House visit after he realized there were only a few players that agreed to attend. He falsely blamed it on the national anthem protests. The problem is, the Eagles never protested the anthem.

This didn’t stop the Trump propaganda network Fox News from using photos of players praying and conflating them with the protests. They later apologized.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made a ridiculous claim that they are not looking at the #1 cause of school deaths when it comes to school safety.

Day 503: Wednesday, June 6

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