Just a reminder, Trump didn’t invent family separation…

Last updated on: June 27, 2018 at 12:40 am by Mark Shea

Just a reminder, Trump didn’t invent family separation… 2018-06-25T22:13:08-07:00 Mark Shea

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…he just figured out a way to use it as a Mob Boss extortion tactic at the border. Obama had no policy for family separation at the border, but the Deporter-in-Chief still tore families apart:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year carried out more than 72,000 deportations of parents who said they had U.S.-born children, according to reports to Congress obtained Wednesday by The Huffington Post.

The reports were sent by ICE in April to the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, as required by law. ICE confirmed the authenticity of the two reports, which lay out 72,410 removals of immigrants who said they had one or more U.S.-born children in 2013.

The reports show that even parents of U.S. citizens are among the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants being expelled from the United States each year. They hold particular significance as President Barack Obama faces pressure to change his deportation policies to keep families together. Obama’s deportation policies are under increased scrutiny by those in both political parties as the House stalls on immigration reform and the government scrambles to deal with an influx of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border illegally. While opponents of immigration reform have argued that Obama’s lax enforcement is attracting new unauthorized immigrants, reform advocates are turning to the White House to slow deportations.

Children born in the U.S. are given automatic citizenship, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, and a 2013 report by Human Impact Partners estimated that 4.5 million U.S. citizen children have at least one parent who is undocumented. When a parent is deported, their U.S.-born children sometimes leave with them. But some stay in the U.S. with another parent or family member. Some children end up in U.S. foster care.

Advocates for halting some deportations have pointed to cases involving parents of children who are U.S. citizens, saying parents should not be separated from their children except in extreme circumstances.

While most of the parents of U.S.-born children deported last year had been convicted of a crime, about 10,700 had no criminal convictions, although they may have fit other ICE priorities for removal, according to the reports.

ICE said 71,214 parents of U.S.-born children who were deported fit its priorities. The priorities include convicted criminals, people caught attempting to enter the country illegally, people who had returned after a previous deportation, and people who failed to report to ICE after a deportation order, according to the report. Because some people may have been deported more than once, the figures reflect total removals, not the exact number of individuals who were deported. The numbers do not include deportations of parents who fail to tell agents they have U.S.-born children or parents whose foreign-born children are undocumented.

Why didn’t you know about this? Chances are, that if you get your information from non-right-wing sources, you did. A Google search for “Obama “deporter in chief”” will give you 30,800 hits. Even “”72,410 children” separated ICE” will give you over a thousand hits.

However, if you tend to only consume right or midstream media, you probably never had this story register on your consciousness. Why? Because the Right Wing Lie Machine did not want to cover it since they did not want to praise Obama.

But now that Trump is torturing children at the border and taking them hostage, the Right Wing Lie Machine is suddenly playing up Obama’s horrendous record of deportation, not out of the slightest interest in his victims, but in order to defend Trump for making still more victims.

Indeed, if you look carefully at the Google result for “”72,410 children” separated ICE” you will notice a consistent pattern: the results from the Right Wing Noise Machine sites (the ones lying that “liberals never talked about this” when Obama was President) are all from a couple of days ago. The results from the Evil Liberal sites are all from 2014, when the story was actually breaking (my link above is from HuffPo, that covered the story at the time. Right wing sites didn’t give a rip. They only care now because they have no defense for Trump except “WhataboutObama!”

The mark of the culture warrior is that he never puts first the people that Jesus puts first: the least of these. On the rare occasion he thinks of them, it is because they are useful, not because they are human beings. Disciples of Jesus think first of the least of these, not of which party will benefit from treating them like vermin.

Obama’s record with deportation and destruction of immigrant families is horrible and deserves unequivocal condemnation. That makes Trump’s current crimes good how?

The mention of the Google search for “Obama “Deporter in Chief“” and the fact that you can find stories on this from Forbidden Liberal Evil Biased Sources like ABC, NBC, PBS, and The Nation (to name just a tiny fraction), reminds me of something I was remarking on the other day to friends on Facebook.

I remarked to a friend–a recovering conservative like me–that “We’re all on a learning curve” as we watch in horror while white, “prolife” conservative Khristianists for KinderKoncentrationKamps cheer for child torture for Jesus at the border.

But then it hits me that this is not really true. Christian conservatives who put faith before party are shocked and horrified and surprised at where Christianist conservatism has gone. But Christian Lefties have, for years, warned that American conservative Christians were on this trajectory. They are not surprised. Nor are they surprised as the Party of Personal Responsibility cheers for this filth, blames it on their enemies, denies it is happening, and says “We’re this way because you made us this way.” They’ve been warning of all that too. And they warned of Obama’s crimes against immigrants too.

It might be prudent for those conservatives asking ourselves, “How in hell did we get here?” to consider the possibility that the people we have ignored for years as beneath contempt might have something to tell us.

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