Trump's "criminal aliens" hate-mongering

Shirin Sinnar writes about the Trump Family Business Administration's evil demagoguery against immigrants in More Misleading Claims on Immigrants and Terrorism Just Security 03/04/2017:

In President Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday night, he claimed that, “[a]ccording to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.” The following day, the Justice Department elaborated to the Washington Post that it had obtained convictions “against over 500 defendants for terrorism or terrorism-related charges in federal courts” and a “review of that information revealed that a substantial majority of those convicted were born in foreign countries.”

The Justice Department did not provide the raw data to support its assertion, but if that data derives from the source it appears to come from – a Justice Department National Security Division (NSD) list of terrorism and terrorism-related convictions – the claim is highly misleading. That’s because the NSD list is designed in ways that seriously undercut its ability to shed light on the scope or source of the terrorist threat.

This is yet another reminder of why its so important to be cautious about unsubstantiated official claims and about the attempts of Trump and his xenophobic supporters to generate fear and hatred by distorted and/or dishonest claims about "criminal aliens."

She gets into the weeds of this claim. And who should turn up there but now-Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama? We have reason to suspect AG Sessions may not be above processing evidence with highly political motives in mind. (Jon Swaine and Oliver Laughland, 'Gun for hire': how Jeff Sessions used his prosecuting power to target Democrats The Guardian 03/04/2017)

For analysis of the "criminal aliens" hate propaganda technique - and that's what it is - see:

• Digby Parton, Trump’s “Office of Immigrant Crime” has sinister implications — and dark echoes of history Salon 03/02/2017
• Peter Beinart, Trump Scapegoats Unauthorized Immigrants for Crime The Atlantic 03/01/2017

Meanwhile, here in the real world of Deportation Nation (Jenny Jarvie, Attorneys for Mississippi 'Dreamer' say they're racing to prevent her deportation Los Angeles Times 03/03/2017):

Attorneys for Daniela Vargas, a young “Dreamer” who was detained by immigration agents in Mississippi after speaking to the media about her family’s plight, say they are racing against the clock to prevent her from being deported without a court hearing.

While an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman continues to maintain that Vargas will appear before an immigration judge, Vargas’ attorney, Abigail Peterson, said ICE officials informed her Thursday that Vargas would be processed as a “visa waiver overstay” and is likely to be flown back to Argentina without a court hearing or bond.

And there's this, Children Sob As Father Arrested By ICE The Young Turks 03/03/2017:

Daniela Vargas and the Trump mass deporation

Daniela Vargas, the Dreamer busted by ICE in Jackson MS after participating in a press conference criticizing the Trump mass deportation, facing an ICE attempt to rapidly deport her:

Matt Kessler, Dreamer in process of Daca renewal to be deported without court hearing The Guardian 03/03/2017
Sarah Fowler, Immigrant detained after press conference Clarion-Ledger 03/01/2017
Julianne Hing, Daniela Vargas’s Detention Shows How Vulnerable DREAMers Are Under Trump The Nation 03/02/2017

Hing writes, "Despite dangling the possibility of immigration reform before the nation this week, the Trump administration continues to show exactly what its immigration intentions are where it matters most: in the streets."

The Young Turks reported on Daniela's story on Thursday, Did Trump Target This Immigration Activist? 03/02/2017:

Daniela and her family are from Argentina, though Daniela herself grew up and finished college in the US. The Buenos Aires Herald reports:

Argentine art curator Juan García Mosqueda, a legal United States resident, was deported from the country after he was detained in an airport for 14 hours, becoming the first known case of an Argentine expelled from the country since President Donald Trump promised to implement stricter border controls. “The process was dehumanising and degrading at the same time,” Mosqueda had posted in an Instagram photo. He complained that he had been interrogated for 14 hours and was threatened from returning to the country for five years. Another Argentine immigrant, Daniela Vargas, was also arrested in Jackson, Mississippi later in the week over immigration issues yet unlike Mosqueda she had been illegally residing in the US.

She was arrested after she decided to publicly denounce on TV that her father, a painter, and brother, a construction worker, were arrested on February 15 by US immigration authorities. Vargas had applied for the Dreamers immigration programme for youths who want to regularise their situation. [my emphasis]

That's not the best report, though. Daniela hadn't just applied for the Dreamers (DACA) status. She had been covered by it and was eligible to renew it, which she had applied to do.

Fowler reports:

Vargas was 7 when her family came to America from Argentina, placing her under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, immigration policy. Under the policy, DACA recipients have to reapply every two years.

Vargas' DACA expired on November 11, 2016. Due to the $495 filing fee, Vargas waited several months to refile. Vargas previously told The Clarion-Ledger she recently had to drop out of school at The Univeristy [sic] of Southern Mississippi for financial reasons.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received Vargas' renewal paperwork Feb. 10, 2017.

Hing explains:

In those years [of Obama's Presidency], undocumented immigrants repeatedly told me that “coming out,” as declaring one’s status publicly came to be known, was actually a safer move, because at least their neighbors and coworkers and friends and fellow churchgoers could know and then help wage a public campaign to support a person should they get caught up in the immigration system. It was hiding in the shadows that put a person at greater risk of being deported.

But Obama is not the president anymore. And while we’ve already seen just how important political protest is in the Trump era, Trump’s executive orders on immigration have explicitly liberated ICE agents to pursue any and every undocumented immigrant. This is the reality—despite Trump’s wishy-washy public statements about DREAMers, whom he’s said he’d deal with “with heart.” The Trump administration has yet to dismantle the DACA program, which exists at the discretion of the president. It is one of Trump’s immigration campaign promises that he’s actually held off on fulfilling, and it’s one of the easiest programs to dismantle.

Yet Trump’s executive orders, the recently released implementation memos from the Department of Homeland Security, and Vargas’s arrest show that DREAMers should consider themselves vulnerable.

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.

Hope and decency vs. fear and hatred in the Trump mass deportation

Pilar Marrero sums um Trump's first weeks in office, which have emphasized his mass deportation effort against Latino immigrants (Un mes de Donald Trump: enfoque intenso contra la inmigración La Opinión 24.02.2017):

Un mes y pocos días después de tomar posesión de la Casa Blanca, el presidente Donald Trump ha dictado órdenes ejecutivas amplias para la ampliación de deportaciones, reafirmado su compromiso con el uso de cárceles privadas para inmigrantes, iniciado el proceso de buscar constructores para el muro fronterizo y prácticamente ha eliminado el uso del español en su gobierno, a excepción de una pírrica cuenta de Twitter (@LaCasaBlanca) que no ha tenido una actualización desde hace 24 días.

[A month and a few days after taking possession of the White House, President Donald Trump has issued broad executive orders to increase deportations, reaffirmed his promise to use private prisons for immigrants, initiating the process of looking for builders for the frontier wall and practically eliminating the use of Spanish in his government, with the exception of a Pyrrhic Twitter account that hasn't been updated for 24 days.]

Since private prison companies will be making money and getting lots of new detainees to hold in the Trump mass deportation operation, it's worth remembering always what a truly bad idea that private prisons are in any case. The story gives us a reminder, Private prison deprived inmates of heat and hot water for months, lawmaker finds by Mary Ellen Klas Miami Herald 02/25/2017:

The 284 women housed in C-dorm at Gadsden Correctional Facility lived for months without hot water or heat, faced flooded bathrooms daily and endured water rations when the septic tanks were jammed with food waste.

After state Rep. David Richardson demanded action following a series of surprise visits over the past 18 months, the private prison operator that runs the facility — Management Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah — received approval from the state to repair and replace the water heater, at a cost to taxpayers of nearly $10,000. But Warden Shelly Sonberg never authorized the work.

Religious communities are playing an important part in immigrant support. Here's just one of many local examples: Sarah Tan, Piedmont: Crowd turns out for immigrant-aid workshop The Montclarion/East Bay Times 02/20/2017:

More than 100 people — including Kehilla Community Synagogue members and the general public — turned out Sunday to find out how to support immigrants.

Kehilla Community Synagogue hosted an “Accompaniment Teams” workshop to enlist those interested in helping the newcomer families acclimate to life in the United States.

The project, called “Nueva Esperanza,” has four teams. At Sunday’s meeting, members of the teams spoke to the public about how hosting asylum-seeking and refugee families from Central America has been an enriching experience for all involved. ...

Kehilla’s accompaniment teams are organized through Nueva Esperanza, which is a project of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, and the Rev. Deborah Lee, the interfaith group’s director, was also present at the workshop. The Nueva Esperanza program was established in 2014, and Lee said she began it to help the growing number of immigrants fleeing violence in Central America.

“There was so much negative anti-immigration sentiment, even back then, that we wanted to show people there was a group that said, ‘Welcome,’ ” Lee said. “And also, not only did they need to know they were being welcomed, they also needed concrete support.”

Catholic campus groups and Catholic colleges are also stepping up to support immigrant students, especially DACA students (Dreamers), as Shireen Korkzan reports for the National Catholic Reporter Online (Despite Catholic campus support, DACA students fear deportation 02/23/2017)

Trump's views of DACA recipients seem ambivalent. In a press conference Feb. 16, he said DACA is "one of the most difficult subjects I have because you have these incredible kids, in many cases, not in all cases. And some of the cases, having DACA and they're gang members and they're drug dealers, too. But you have some absolutely, incredible kids, I would say mostly. They were brought here in such a way — it's a very — it's a very, very tough subject."

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says Trump's new immigration policies will leave DACA alone for now, but the fear of possible arrest and deportation still lingers.

CNN reported Feb. 14 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE, detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a 23-year-old DACA recipient living in the Seattle area. ICE has alleged Medina is a gang member and a "risk to public safety," even though his attorneys denied all accusations. Medina, who doesn't have a criminal record, has a bond hearing Feb. 24.

Immigration rights groups say Medina might be the first DACA recipient who has been arrested without cause.

Catholic institutions of higher education across the country are also concerned about their undocumented students. After the presidential election in November, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities released a statement expressing support for undocumented students at its member institutions through "campus counseling and ministry support, through legal resources from those campuses with law schools and legal clinics and through whatever other services we may have at our disposal."

Pilar Marrero's report describes the mounting effects of the emerging state terror against immigrants:

Según PEW, el 55% de los inmigrantes indocumentados, 38% de hispanos nacidos en Estados Unidos y 49% de residentes legales hispanos, están preocupados por su futuro en el país. Un 47% de los adultos hispanos, de cualquier estatus migratorio, está “muy preocupado” o “algo preocupado” por las deportaciones, sea la suya propia, amigo o familiar.

[According to Pew [Research Center], 55% of undocumented immigrants, 38% of Hispanics born in the United States and 49% of legal Hispanic residents are preoccupied about their future in the country. Around 47% of Hispanic adults, of any immigration status, are "very preoccupied" or "somewhat preoccupied" by the deportations, whether its themselves, a friend or a family member.]

Meanwhile, the conservative government of Mexican President Eenrique Peña Nieto is handling Central American refugees in a dubious way itself, Mexico doubles deportations of US-bound migrants 02/14/2017:

In a more decent North America, the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico would be cooperating constructively on ways to combat violence in Central America, create jobs in Mexico and set up sane, humane and realistic immigration policy in the US. As important as it is to debunk false comparisons between Obama's immigration policy and the far more radical and draconian mass deportation Trump has set in motion, the fact is that Obama's Administration had a conservative policy in Latin America, the Cuba normalization notwithstanding. Supporting the 2009 coup in Honduras was not only a particularly bad decision, one of the which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was very proud, contributed directly to dangerous conditions in that Central American country.

It's worth remembering that when the Bill Clinton Administration made its big push for the NAFTA treaty negotiated under Old Man Bush's Administration, one of their arguments in favor of it was the idea that the treaty would create more jobs in Mexico and thereby reduce unauthorized emigration from Mexico to the US.

It didn't work out that way, as James Patterson explained in Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (2005):

NAFTA did not seem to greatly benefit Mexico, which suffered, as earlier, from widespread poverty and unemployment. Struggling peasants raising maize, hit hard by competition from the United States, were devastated. These and other desperately poor people continued to stream into the United States, provoking rising tensions in many parts of the Southwest.

Of course, when production of grains shifts from Mexico to the United States, displaced Mexican farm workers migrate in greater numbers to work for big growers in California and Texas and elsewhere.

We need really different kinds of policies. And not the different kind the Trump Family Business Administration is implementing.

Deportation Nation today

Xenophobia is ugly and often stupidly self-destructive. One example: Nathan Fletcher, Trump order drops protection for families of deployed military San Diego Union-Tribune 02/24/2017.

Here's another, Silvia Zuvieta Rodriguez considered suicide after her father was deported PBS Newshour 02/24/2017:

Apparently hassling legal travelers for no good reason is also part of the America First ritual now: Emma Graham-Harrison, US border agents ask Muhammad Ali's son: 'Are you a Muslim?' The Guardian 02/25/2017; Bonnie Malkin, Australian children's author Mem Fox detained by US border control: 'I sobbed like a baby' The Guardian 02/24/2017; Mem Fox, Australian author, gets apology after being wrongfully detained at LA airport ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) 02/204/2017.

The ABC story reports, "She said the border agents appeared to have been given "turbocharged power" by an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to 'humiliate and insult' a room full of people they detained to check visas."

Speaking of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has set up a Trump's America webpage. Here's another of their current stories, Donald Trump: Mexico bristles at US President's 'hostile' new deportation rules ahead of immigration talks 02/24/2017:

Mexico is reacting with anger to a Trump administration plan to deport non-Mexican illegal immigrants over their border if they entered the US from the southern neighbouring nation.

One official called the new US immigration guidelines "hostile" hours before senior Trump administration envoys began arriving in Mexico City for talks on the volatile issue. ...

Mexico's lead negotiator with the Trump administration, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, said there was no way Mexico would accept the new rules, which among other things seek to deport non-Mexicans to Mexico. ...

Roberto Campa, who heads the human rights department of the Interior Ministry, said the plan to deport non-Mexicans to Mexico was "hostile" and "unacceptable."

One of the dangerous moves of the Trump government is a push to quickly expand ICE enforcement with contractors, aka, rent-a-cops.(Pilar Marrero, La rápida contratación de agentes migratorios tiene sus peligros La Opinión 02/24/2017) Private security in an office building is one thing. Inadequately trained rent-a-cops on highly sensitive border enforcement is a different thing.

Keeping an eye on the role of private contractors will offer revealing insights the Trump mass deportation. Private for-profit prison businesses will get a cut of the action - and cash, of course! - in the vast new detentions by the Trump Family Business Administration as part of the mass deportation drive. (Madison Pauly, The Private Prison Industry Is Licking Its Chops Over Trump's Deportation Plans Mother Jones 02/21/2017)

It's worth keeping in mind that our anti-public-education Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' brother is Erik Prince, Yes, the Blackwater guy. (Jeremy Scahill, Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Is Advising Trump From the Shadows The Intercept 01/17/2017) I will be astonished is he doesn't get cut in on some major business in this process, i.e., the mass deportation and the rest of the Trump fiasco.

The risks to Mexico in this mass deportation are enormous. If this Administration does what President Tinyhands proposed to do during his campaign and pushes out 11-12 million undocumented immigrants, and pushes the bulk of them into Mexico, that would be a real humanitarian catastrophe with Mexico bearing the brunt of it.

Olga Pellicer is not impressed so far with the cautious approach Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has been taking to the new US administration so, as she explains in México en la política exterior de Trump Proceso 24.02.2017. She references the multi-city demonstrations on the 12th of February encouraged by Peña Nieto's political operation to show solidarity with the Mexican President against the US that had a notably modest turnout:

La falta de una narrativa convincente que vaya desglosando objetivos, estrategias, costos y logros en el acercamiento al gobierno de Trump es una de las debilidades más evidentes del camino seguido por Enrique Peña Nieto. No hay un discurso que concite el apoyo de grupos amplios de la sociedad mexicana a los objetivos que se fijen para la relación con Estados Unidos. Al no existir ese discurso, los intentos de movilizar a la población para expresar su agravio por los mensajes humillantes de Trump a los mexicanos han sido un fracaso. La falta de claridad respecto de las causas a defender en una marcha explica los resultados tan limitados de las que se llevaron a cabo en diversas ciudades del país el domingo 12.

[The lack of a convincing narrative that breaks out objectives, strategies, costs and benefits in the approach to Trump's government is one of the most evident weaknesses of the [conciliatory] road chosen by Enrique Peña Nieto. There is no discourse that draws the support of broad sections of Mexican society to the objective on which they are focused in the relationship with the United States. Since this discourse doesn't exist, the effort to mobilize the population to express their insulted from the humiliating messages from Trump to the Mexicans has been a failure. The lack of clarity to respect of the causes to be defended in a march explicates the so limited results in the turnoout of those in various cities of the country on Sunday the 12th.]

Here is yet another example of how implemented standard neoliberal Washington Consensus economic policies leaves the public of a country doubtful about whether they can trust the established political elites to get even a critical matter of national interest right.

Pushing forward with the Trump mass deportation

McClatchy reports on other notions being considered at high levels of the Trump Family Business Administration on mass deportation and repression against immigrants, Exclusive: DHS chief proposes prosecuting parents of children smuggled into U.S. by Franco Ordoñez 02/18/2017. Some of the leaks we're seeing like this may be "trial balloon" tests of public and Congressional reaction.

The two leaked memoranda reported on in this piece are Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest and Implementing the President's Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies, both dated February 17 and both signed by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.

As of the writing of the article, neither had been officially adopted as policy by the Trump Family Business Administration. But given the credible reports of serious misconduct by ICE agents during the early weeks of Trump's mass deportation effort, it's also possible that leaking these memorandum could function as a kind of wink-and-nod to ICE as to what the Administration's intentions and desires are.

Ordoñez reports:

The draft orders also would affect thousands of children who arrived in the United States as “unaccompanied minors” and were subsequently reunited with a parent living in the country illegally. Those children would no longer be protected against deportation, and their parents would be subject to criminal prosecution if they had paid human traffickers to bring their children across the border – a common scenario now.

One of the memos said 155,000 unaccompanied children have been detained in the past three years, and that 60 percent of them were later reunited with a parent inside the United States.

“The surge of illegal immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources and has created a significant national security vulnerability to the United States,” Kelly wrote in the memorandums, copies of which were made available to McClatchy Saturday.

For the Trump Family Business Administration and its white supremacist supporters, five-year-old children being reunited with their parents are "a significant national security vulnerability."

Illicit diplomatic dealings with Russia? Not a problem. Family values in uniting minor children with their parents? Ha, you didn't think Republicans were serious with all that "family values" jabber, did you? This is how the Trumpists view threats to "national security." Some to kind in mind when the Trump Family Business Administration decides they can enrich themselves and their cronies by invading some other country.

Ordoñez also explains:

The memos were intended to implement two of Trump’s executive orders on enforcement of immigration laws inside the United States, but would go farther by wiping away several orders President Barack Obama issued to protect those in the United States who had not committed criminal acts beyond entering the country without permission.

“These memorandums represent a significant attempt to expand the enforcement authority of the administration in areas that have been heavily litigated,” said Leon Fresco, who headed the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation under Obama.

For what it's worth, both memoranda use identical language saying, "This memorandum implements the Executive Order entitled "Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements," issued by the President on January 25, 2017." The President said in his news conference last week that this EO would be withdrawn during this coming week and replaced by another.

The "Enforcement of the Immigration Laws" memo contains this language:

The Department no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. In faithfully executing the immigration laws, Department personnel should take enforcement actions in accordance with applicable law. In order to achieve this goal, as noted below, I have directed ICE to hire I 0,000 officers and agents expeditiously, and to take enforcement actions consistent with available resources. However, in order to maximize the benefit to public safety, to stem unlawful migration and to prevent fraud and misrepresentation, Department personnel should prioritize for removal those aliens described by Congress in Sections 212(a)(2), (a)(3), and (a)(6)(C), 235(b) and (c), and 237(a)(2) and (4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Additionally, regardless of the basis of removability, Department personnel should prioritize removable aliens who: (1) have been convicted of any criminal offense; (2) have been charged with any criminal offense that has not been resolved; (3) have committed acts which constitute a chargeable criminal offense; (4) have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter before a governmental agency; (5) have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits; (6) are subject to a final order of removal but have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the United States; or (7) in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.

I won't try to get into the weeds of all those categories. But I'll note here that wording like "have committed acts which constitute a chargeable criminal offense," i.e., not even charged much less convicted with no distinction of the kind of criminal offenses specified, and "in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security" are broad enough to put hundreds of thousands or even millions in those detention center in which private for-profit prison companies are planning to detain the targets of this mass deportation. Especially since the same memorandum defines minors reuniting with their parents as "a significant national security vulnerability."

I'm not familiar with these kinds of immigration-enforcement policy documents, so it's hard for me to make a judgment as whether some of the statements in both memoranda are considered as necessary legal stipulations in such documents or whether they are propaganda statements to promote the Trumpist line about the scary, scary "criminal aliens." But I will say it's hard to tell the difference in some cases.

Daphne Eviatar engages in some informed speculation about how the new version of the Muslim Ban Executive Order may approach the anti-refugee policies that Trump tried to implement with the January 25 EO, Travel Ban Could Let Repressive Regimes Decide Who Can Enter US Just Security 02/17/2017. As she notes, not every provision of the January 25 EO is covered by the federal court stay. And she explains:

The [Jan 25] order appears to envision the U.S. government seeking and relying on information from some of the most repressive and dysfunctional regimes in the world, about the citizens who are fleeing them, often because of that repression and dysfunction. Would the United States rely on the Iranian regime, for example, to vet the requests of Iranian political dissidents and fleeing religious minorities, and to provide the U.S. government reliable information about those dissidents or minorities so the US can grant them a visa? Would the United States rely on information from the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria — with which the US was not long ago on the brink of war — to vet leaders of opposition groups we’ve supported, or their family members?

And it's hard to argue with her characterization of it:

It’s a bizarre plan that would place the fate of the persecuted in the hands of their persecutors, and would rely on information provided by our proclaimed enemies to determine who we will allow in the United States. What’s more, if the United States were actually planning to provide these states with the names of individuals seeking to come to the United States, it would immediately endanger not only the individuals seeking to leave, but also their family members, who intend (or are forced) to stay behind.

Of course, the U.S. government should gather reliable information about refugees. And through a rigorous and often grueling vetting process, it already does.

... to insist that every applicant’s home country provide that information, even if it’s a country that the US routinely criticizes for prosecuting, imprisoning and executing people based on false charges and fabricated evidence, is beyond absurd. Since some of these countries are clearly not U.S. allies, and would likely either refuse or be unable to provide the requested information, the scheme could in effect – and perhaps by design – lead to a default ban on refugees from Muslim-majority countries.We would be turning our backs on precisely those refugees who need us the most.

And, on the family unification issue, she notes, "Within the US, the effect would be to deny established immigrant and refugee communities already here the ability of ever seeing their relatives again."

She also cites the legal opinion of federal District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema in Tareq Aqel Mohammaed Azis v. Donald Trump (Lawfare link), which says:

Defendants have maintained that the EO is necessary to protect the United States from terrorist attacks tobe carried out by nationals ofthe seven affected countries [Dkts. 31-1, 80]; however, they have not offered any evidence to identify the national security concems that allegedly prompted this EO, or even described the process by which the president concluded that this action was necessary.

And contrary to the national security concems recited in the EO, the only evidence in the record on this subject is a declaration of 10 national security professionals who have served at the highest levels of the Departinent of State, the Departinent of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Council through both Republican and Democratic administrations, [Dkt. 57], and at least four of whom "were current on active intelligence regarding all credible terrorist threat streams directed against the [United States] as recently as one week before the issuance of the" EO. Id. at Ƣ  2. They write

We all agree that the United States faces real threats from terrorist networks and must take all prudent and effective steps to combat them, including the appropriate vetting of travelers to the United States. We all are nevertheless unaware of any specific threat that would justify the travel ban established by the Executive Order issued on January 27, 2017. We view the Order as one that ultimately undermines the national security of the United States, rather than making us safer. In our professional opinion, this Order cannot be justified on national security or foreign policy grounds.

Id.. at Ƣ  3. They also observe that since September 11, 2011, "not a single terrorist attack in the United States has been perpetrated by aliens from the countries named in the Order." Id. at Ƣ  4.

The Trump Wall and mass deportation program

From Elizabeth Drew, Terrifying Trump New York Review of Books 02/07/2017:

Then there was the Wall, which had begun as a political fantasy — an illusion of Trump’s creation to fire up his followers at rallies. The Wall was his metaphor for “getting tough with Mexico” for its ostensibly “sending us” criminals, drugs, and rapists, though Mexico has cooperated with the US government to prevent such immigration and drug running, as well as the transit of Central Americans trying to reach the US. In fact, immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans.

Trump’s case against illegal Mexican immigration into the US is counterfactual in still another sense: for years more Mexicans have been leaving the US than have been coming into the country. Trump and numerous congressional Republicans intone about the necessity for “border security,” but in fact the US has spent an estimated $132 billion since fiscal year 2005 on fences, additional agents, sensors, surveillance cameras with night vision, helicopters, drones, and radar — and illegal crossings have dropped dramatically.

Once elected, Trump had to at least act as if he was determined to build his chimerical but audience-pleasing Wall. If it happens to not be built, he can say he tried and pass the blame onto others for unwillingness to “protect our borders.” His second reckless, crowd-pleasing claim, that he’d get Mexico to pay for the Wall, plus his own inability to suffer a rebuke, got him into an unnecessary row with the president of Mexico, whose country of course has no intention of paying for the Wall. [my emphasis]

Reading this brought to mind John Steinbeck's introduction to a published collection of his Second World War articles as a reporter oversees, Once There Was a War (1958):

For what they are worth, or for what they may recapture, here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, half-meaningless memories of a time and of attitudes which have gone forever from the world, a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry, so that it stand in the mind like the battle pictures of Crécy and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. And, although all war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.

Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror. [my emphasis]