Deportation Nation unleased

Digby Parton takes on the mass deporation issue in her Salon column today, Trump takes the “shackles” off: Mass deportations begin as the world looks on in outrage 02/27/2017:L

We know that a serious concern about the threat of terrorism is not the motivation for the travel ban. Echoing George W. Bush administration’s treatment of intelligence analyses that showed little evidence that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program, the Trump administration has apparently rejected a Department of Homeland Security report indicating that “country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity.” Claiming that the report was politically motivated and poorly researched, a White House spokesman said, “The president asked for an intelligence assessment. This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.” That’s not how this works. ...

[It is clear] that those called “bad dudes” by Trump and his Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are all undocumented immigrants, and the Trump team wants to deport every one of them. Horror stories are multiplying like the one of agents arresting a woman seeking shelter from an abusive boyfriend, and another tale of officials detaining a woman with no criminal history who was in the hospital seeking treatment for a brain tumor. Incidents have been reported of Customs and Border Patrol agents demanding that all passengers on a domestic flight provide IDs when disembarking the airplane, which is highly unusual.

And I certainly won't quarrel with this judgment of Digby, "African-Americans and Latinos living in urban neighborhoods can be sure that he plans to “take off the shackles” there, too."

The Stream from Al Jazeera English reports on current developments in Trump's mass deportation program, Trump’s immigration crackdown: Part II 02/27/2017:

Part 1 02/23/2017, with the same panelists, from 02/23/2017:

One of the panelists is Jessica Vaughan from the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The Southern Poverty Law Center said of CIS in 2010 (Fudging Facts: A Look At CIS' Studies 01/29/2010):

CIS has blamed immigrants, both legal and undocumented, for everything from terrorism to global warming. To make its case seem as strong as possible, CIS often manipulates data, relying on shaky statistics or faulty logic to come to the preordained conclusion that immigration is bad for this country. But CIS studies have been regularly debunked by mainstream academics and think tanks including the Immigration Policy Center, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and America's Voice.

Vaughan in both videos makes a polite version of the hardline pro-mass-deportation pitch. But she also does crass fear-mongering about "criminal aliens." It's cheap demagoguery, even when delivered in a relatively polite tone.

And, as I've mentioned before, the Trump mass deportation offers rich prospects for the private prison industry, as the Young Turks report in Trump Team Can't Wait To Fill More Private Prisons With Minorities 02/26/2017

And Erik Prince is there looking for new bitness in the Trump Family Business Administration.

Erik Prince is Back: Former CEO of Blackwater Offering Services to the Trump Administration

I haven't seen any indications yet that Prince's company is under consideration for private prisons or domestic law enforcement.

The instances of white people behaving badly in the United States aren't made any less deplorable by white people in Europe behaving badly. Though that's occurring, too.