And approximately seventy million people have voted for that candidate.
Okay, so with all of that in mind, please provide the nuance you want to talk about. I’m very interested in this nuance that you claim will move us away from “crazy extremist”.
And approximately seventy million people have voted for that candidate.
Okay, so with all of that in mind, please provide the nuance you want to talk about. I’m very interested in this nuance that you claim will move us away from “crazy extremist”.
There are pro-lifers who think that basically nothing outweighs the 'murder of unborn children' and can't fathom voting for a Democrat. You might have more in common with them than you think.
Strangely enough, pro-lifers generally oppose those kinds of things.
Is it not possible that in the context of immigration there can also be situations where it needs to happen? (e.g. communal housing could put children in the vicinity of harmful people, or fake families with human traffickers posing as parents)
This was not actually a policy. This was a side effect of a different policy. The policy was zero tolerance on criminal immigration law. That means, if an adult crosses the border illegally, they committed a crime and must be arrested for said crime. That part isn’t actually new, Trump just directed them to enforce the law. That’s where the issue comes in. When an adult male goes to jail, such as if I were to get a DUI with my kid in the car, I’m not allowed to take a kid in with me to jail. It doesn’t matter if they’ll be left alone with no one to care for them. No matter what, arrestees can not bring their kids to jail, ever.
So in this situation, the parent is arrested and charged with a crime, and the kids are held until a guardian can be located. And guess what? Many from Mexico or El Salvador actually don’t want to come up to the US and get their kids, if such a person even exists. The Obama admin built these “cages” for that reason. But, they didn’t enforce the law as much, so they were not used so often. They did build them and they did put kids in them though.
the heads of the three major immigration agencies wrote to their boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, to present her with three options for how to step up immigration enforcement at the border. They recommended “Option 3” — prosecuting every adult who crossed the border illegally, including those who came with their children — because it would “have the greatest impact on current flows.”[2]
> No matter what, arrestees can not bring their kids to jail, ever.
And yet through some miracle they reversed this policy and issued a new executive order reversing the "zero-tolerance policy" that says:
"The President’s executive order issued on June 20, 2018, directed, among other things, that the Secretary of Homeland Security maintain custody of alien families during any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their family members, to the extent possible. This order stated that the policy of the administration is to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate."[1]
This is a return to how it used to be run - families were detained together.
[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/696788.pdf
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/09/25/family-separation-border...
Well, everyone who supports Trump decided that those policies are better than the alternative.
What could be worse than children in camps is beyond me though ...
Lots of them care more about abortion and religion that you presumably do, and that's what makes Biden worse for them - the fear that they'll lose their ability to practice their faith and have it be part of their lives.
I don't get it either, but you're essentially doing the same thing to them that they do when they claim that Biden will introduce a Green New Deal, or make abortions mandatory or something (I should watch more Fox, clearly, so I'd have better examples here).
At the same time, no, I'm not essentially doing the same thing. Let's face the facts - the current conservative media environment (Fox, etc) is deeply distorted.
I'm not making claims based on bad information, or making untrue claims.
Let's also bear in mind that, as much as networks like Fox distort and manipulate the truth, I'd bet plenty of people in these distorted media environments have a degree of understanding that what the Trump administration has done is wrong.
But people (all people) hate the discomfort of cognitive dissonance and look for any reason to avoid it.
To circle back to the main point, people making false claims (even if they are unaware of the falsehoods their claims are based on) is not the same thing as someone else pointing out the falsehood itself.
So here goes:
> One candidate supports separating children from their families
This is objectively false. Nobody "supports" that position at all as a matter of policy - rather you have oversimplified a complex problem to the point of absurdity. A police officer pulls over a drunk driver and finds kids in the car. The driver is arrested. Do the kids go too? No, of course not. Is it correct to say that "the police support separating children from their families"? Only in the most technical and intentionally misleading sense. Is it their policy to find ways to separate kids from parents? Of course not. Are there sometimes situations in which the only practical solution is to separate some kids from their parents? Yep!
> keeping them in cages
Again, nobody "supports" keeping children in cages. (and do keep in mind that these so-called "cages" were used by earlier administrations too) But consider this situation: your country has a standing policy that when a refugee comes to your border, instead of turning them away, you let them in, you keep them in a temporary facility while you try to go through the legal process of evaluating their asylum claims or whatever because your country also has a standing policy that people just can't wander into the country unaccounted for. Most of the time, these two policies can be in harmony, but one day 20k people show up on your doorstep. Policy A says you don't turn them away, policy B says you don't let them loose into the country. What do you do? And I'm not talking about what would be the long term ideal, if we have unlimited time and money. I mean what do you do about this problem /today/? You're probably going to scramble and set up some temporary shelter while you get the policymakers to start figuring out a real solution, but you can't just call into existence beds, food, and furnishings.
> and has lost track of 500 of them.
The president obviously doesn't track them to begin with, so Trump obviously didn't lose track of them (any more than the 800,000 who are reported missing each year were personally lost by Trump - see https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-missing-children/miss...).
I'm not really interested in debating these specific policies, because the larger issue is that you can look at things one of two ways: 1) There are 70 million people who voted for an idiot. By extension, they must be terrible to some degree or another too. 2) The solution to any "interesting" problem - especially social problems - involves tradeoffs, conflicting objectives, pros and cons. If the solution really were trivial and simple, we wouldn't argue about it. The debate is because it's so complex, and with any really complex problem, you can have very reasonable and intelligent people draw different conclusions on how best to proceed.
If you choose to see the U.S through the lens of #1, you may as well give up now, because it's hopeless - those people are barely people and are separated from you by an insurmountable gulf. OTOH lens #2 is hopeful - you see that ultimately everyone wants pretty much the same high level objectives, the debate is the path to get there and how to spend limited resources. With #1, nothing will get done. With #2, potentially everything is possible.
As a matter of policy the Trump administration's position was that making getting caught trying to enter the United States illegally as painful as possible, including family separations and the risk of losing your children.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-admin-dis...
It was a literal policy. It is Trump policy. Try again.
ETA: And just to be clear, even the administration admitted it was their policy, because they later reversed it!
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/us/politics/trump-immigra...
Well except that the Trump admin explicitly changed from a policy of not separating families.
> I mean what do you do about this problem /today/?
Stop policy B. The executive has the power to do so. There is no law requiring that asylum seekers be kept in detention centers. Trump directly ended catch-and-release policies by executive order in 2017.
These two things are things that Donald Trump explicitly and personally changed. The orders quite literally have his signature on them.
Right, except that there are good reasons against just letting in whoever claims asylum without properly vetting them; there are some very large downsides to what you're suggesting. Your position is that the risks are worth it, and that's fine, but others will argue that different approaches can solve the problem with less risk and less total harm. No single position is without tradeoffs, hence the debate.
But again, the larger point here is that the oversimplification of a complex issue is nothing more than a way to take cheap shots by making opposing views into something sinister. It's a borderline ad hominem attack - my opponent is evil, therefore I can dismiss his concerns without ever really addressing them.
Do you have any data to back this up? I don't remember the issue under the Obama admin.
> No single position is without tradeoffs, hence the debate.
There's a difference between a debate and an Executive Order. Donald Trump isn't "debating" putting people in cages. He is putting people in cages. He, personally, changed policy to put people who otherwise would not have been in cages.
In fact, this policy was both so unpopular and legally tenuous that Trump was forced to roll much of it back due to intense pressure from, well, pretty much everyone else. Even the CBP said that the zero tolerance policy trump adopted was bad.
> It's a borderline ad hominem attack - my opponent is evil, therefore I can dismiss his concerns without ever really addressing them.
Yes well, if you don't want that, you shouldn't have Stephen Miller write your border policy.
So it happened by accident?
Is that not worse?
Usually that means it changes through political decision. I don't know what happened in this particular case since I don't keep enough track of US politics.
FWIW, somehow I find that sort of accidental evil even worse than a mustache-twirling villain, you know?
Like, somebody had to put that first kid in a cage and lock it. That can't have felt good. What was it that prevented that person from saying on that day, "You know what, fuck this, we're not doing this."?
So do you actually have an answer or not?
"Permanently" is a new one on me, even Trump-haters don't go that far. This whole thing is about a temporary measure while confirming that the adults with the children really are their parents, and not some random person smuggling children across the border.
The system is backlogged so it's definitely taking much longer than it should, but not permanently unless it's found the adult and child aren't related.
You're playing a rhetorical game, rather than having an honest discussion.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-do...
The entire child crusade was caused by the Obama administration unilaterally changing asylum law to allow claims that are unrelated to a claimant's home nation state actions. Until then, being from a poor crime ridden country was not a valid ground for an asylum claim in any country. During the Obama administration, an immigration judge ruled that such a claim was valid, the Obama DOJ let the ruling stand (the DOJ can overrule immigration judges).
As soon as this policy was recognized and promoted by NGOs, the flood gates opened, women and children first instead of working adults first.
Also, until then absent congress made law for special cases, one could not travel through n-number of countries until eventually reaching the one you want to claim asylum in.
Asylum is a remedy for people in danger because of state actions or state actors -- it must be made in the first reached neutral country, not four countries over because that country has better benefits.
Trump's DOJ put things back to normal.
That’s what the family separation controversy is about - minors who arrived along with their parents but were then separated from them. Unaccompanied minors are a separate issue.
I admit, I haven't extensively researched this, but would like to collect more info and keep an open mind.
But at the same time, I think the larger issue is a bit more nuanced, than simply assuming people are all monsters.
for e.g. After some initial research :- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/migrant-children-separ...
>Some of the families who have been identified have decided their children would be safer in the United States than in their home countries, and elected for the children to stay with friends or family members who agreed to sponsor them.
>And because the computer system used by border authorities for processing incoming migrants had not been updated to accommodate family separations, the agents often inadvertently deleted identification numbers that could have been used to keep track when parents and children were sent to different places.
>In some cases, members of the steering committee have had access to only names and countries of origin while trying to locate separated parents. Even after conducting public record searches to identify the cities where the families were from, they faced additional hurdles. Many of the families had fled their homes to escape violence or extortion, intentionally withholding information from friends and neighbors about where they were going.
etc..