Here are some key video excerpts of an interview this afternoon with Thomas Homan, acting Director of ICE. Homans is a career ICE officer, back to its predecessor organizations. Despite being a career employee he’s turned out to be an ardent Trumper. Blitzer does an excellent job, continually coming back to press the key points, repeatedly with government statistics on hand to refute claims by Homans which are either deceptive or outright lies. Read More

A notice or reminder. President Trump is going to give one of his campaign-style rallies tonight in Duluth, Minnesota. Coming on the heels of what appears to be Trump’s aggressive and embattled mood over the family separation policy and anger that the furor is crowding out coverage of the Inspector General’s Report (yes, he’s actually mad about that), one can only imagine what that speech is going to be like.

Donald Trump reportedly gave an angry fighting talk to House Republicans last night. We’re also led to believe they’re angry about the President’s family separation policy. But at least according to these photos released through the President’s Twitter feed, these folks were loving their dear leader. Bigly.

Click the image for full screen view.

Every discussion of immigration from the President and most Republicans begins with a lie intended to frame the question. Government statistics show clearly that immigrants, whether legal or not, do not increase crime rates. Full stop. Immigrants do not create crime. Undisputed data shows that immigrants actually commit crimes at a slightly lower rate than native-born American citizens. The entire security and safety argument is simply false. If we were truly concerned about public safety and wanted to address the issue through immigration policy we’d do better by inviting in more immigrants and booting citizens who are already here. It’s all a straight-up lie, the purported balancing of security and humane treatment. There are many legitimate immigration related policy questions. But controlling crime or safety or security is simply not one of them. It’s the foundational lie of the entire immigration debate.

The President says he’s signing an executive order to end family separations. The actual aim seems to be to pick a fight with the courts and allow separations to continue while blaming judges. According to The New York Times, the President will sign an executive order allowing children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The problem is that that violates a 1997 consent decree saying that you can’t detain/imprison children for more than 20 days (technically what’s currently happening isn’t detention). It straight up violates that order. So what will almost inevitably happen is that a court will step in, say you can’t do that and then Trump will announce that the judge is forcing him to keep separating families.

From a column in The Houston Chronicle from a flight attendant refusing to fly more flights in which migrant children separated from their families are being transported …

I have told my story to many of my flight attendant colleagues and they have pledged to do the same.

Since sharing my story, I learned from a fellow flight attendant that he was lied to by an ICE agent who said the children on the flight were part of a soccer team. When pressed, the agent finally admitted that they were, indeed children who were being relocated to assigned camps.

This inhumane separation of migrant children from their families is against the morals and principles instilled in me, as well as my religious and spiritual teachings.

In Michael Cohen’s letter resigning his position as a Deputy Finance Chair at the RNC he also took a moment to call the President’s family separation policy “heart wrenching” and said that “children should never be used as bargaining chips.”

And there you have it. DOJ confirms that the White House knows the President’s executive order is in fact illegal on its face. What it does is set a 20 day countdown until Trump blames a court for forcing him to separate more families again.

JUST IN: Senior Justice Department official Gene Hamilton confirms the Flores settlement still controls, and that unless Congress or the court acts, the government can only detain families together for "up to 20 days."

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) June 20, 2018

I am about at my wit’s end with Times‘ analysis and trend pieces. Just stop! (A subject for another day.) But this one on Trump’s deal-making and actual failure to make really any deals in 17 months as President contains a highly salient quotation, which we will need to think about a lot over the coming years. The words are from Daniel M. Price, a Bush era trade advisor. “What the president seemingly fails to understand is that in foreign policy and in trade policy — unlike in real estate transactions — the parties are all repeat players. The country you insult or seek undue advantage over today you will have to work with again tomorrow.” Read More

I was mainly offline for a few days. So when I plugged back in last night I realized that we are in the throes of another debate about the decline of “civility” in public life. This is a mealy mouthed word that has no clear meaning beyond social delicacy and the importance of not speaking up too aggressively. As a society the line we should guard is opposition to violence, physical intimidation and menace as tools of civic life. These are wrong in principle, ineffective in practice and tools which the fascistic elements in society will always be able to use more consistently and coherently than those who believe in free society and the rule of law. Read More