Wow. Trump practices Recycling. Ok, so it’s in an awful way because they are recycling immigrants but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with how for years Trump has screamed at the top of his lungs about the decades long practice of what’s commonly called Catch and Release. In practice it means processing people who’ve crossed the border who are seeking asylum or for some other reason, and most of the time if there are no red flags letting them into the country to work and live until their case can be heard in a formal proceeding. Most, over 90% do in fact show up, sometimes years after they crossed the border.
As I said, to Trump this was the most awful thing our government could do and he vowed to stop it. He even claimed to have done so. However as is so often is the case with Trump there’s a difference between what he says and what he does. In this case, we now know immigrants are being taken from detention in a facility in Texas near Laredo, and then dropped off in Laredo to fend for themselves until such time as they get their hearing! That makes one wonder how many other places this is happening in. What matters is that yes, Trump’s people are doing EXACTLY what he torched Biden (and others before that) for doing!
I first learned about this while watching MS NOW this afternoon. A reporter was in Laredo and she said over the past three weeks roughly a hundred people a day who’ve been at a detention center not that far away are being dropped off. Dumped. Why Laredo? Well, I suppose it’s a good enough size place, but it also has a shelter (supported by private donations) for immigrants. I don’t recall the reporter’s name but her piece included a clip of her at a presser hosted by Governor Abbott and she asked him about it. He seemed a bit startled and dissembled.
Still, it got me thinking. 100 people a day for three weeks is over 2000 people. And again, if it’s happening in Laredo chances are it’s happening in other places. Let’s focus on Laredo since we know for sure it’s going on there. A search for news about Trump and Catch and Release was almost all stories about him doing away with it. Or links to government websites saying so. It took several tries with different wording but I finally found a grand total of two, count em two stories about the current situation. The most informative is this one by The Laredo Morning Times. It includes Representative Henry Cuellar who happens to be from Laredo. The article starts by noting Cuellar had been unware (until a recent phone call) that people/families were being dropped off with no funds to help themselves:
Cuellar said he learned of the releases only after receiving a phone call asking whether he knew families were being sent to the Holding Institute, a longtime Laredo nonprofit that provides temporary shelter and basic services.
“My response was, no, I did not know that this was happening,” Cuellar said during remarks at the institute. “They’re releasing people from the Dilley facility … to, as far as we know, only one place on the border, which is here at Holding.”
Cuellar said families are being released from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, a family detention facility, and transported to Laredo in varying numbers. Some days, he said, the institute receives as few as about two dozen people, while other days the number can reach close to 100.
The families include both recent border crossers and people who were detained in the interior of the United States, Cuellar said.
That’s a lot to take in, and I urge you to take a few minutes to read the entire linked article. I want to focus on two things – lately the number of people has gone up from what Cuellar learned was taking place. Three straight weeks of a hundred a day is no blip. A lot of these people waste no time contacting someone back from where they’d been living to make arrangements to get home. Home here in the U.S. Read between the lines and consider all those people showing up at immigration offices being whisked away by ICE.
We’ve all read plenty of stories about people who’ve not been in any trouble, or had some issue decades ago and perhaps even had a removal order but were allowed to stay – with regular chieck-ins to ensure they were keeping out of trouble. In and out. Until this past year at least. Some have been far enough along in the green card or actual citizenship process as to be making what they though would be their last visit, only to get rounded up by the “Men In Black Masks’ (and tactical gear!). Well, it looks like after weeks, sometimes months of detention some of them are being ‘released’ – as in dumped off in the street near a shelter! As the linked article says for so many it’s a case of making it back to where they’d been living and re-starting the whole process.
Of course the same thing could happen in the future but it still boggles the mind. In order to meet Stephen Miller’s quota of arrests ICE is RECYCLING immigrants! If we weren’t talking about human beings, shattered lives and innocence (children have been part of this) it would be amusing. But there’s a human toll being paid, and one against the image of the United States. The rest of the world is seeing what’s going on and reacting the way the majority of our citizens are reacting. With disgust and sometimes horror.
Noem is furiously working to expand ICE’s facilities to hold more people. Frankly, they don’t have a choice but to release people, especially with a growing number of judges slapping them around like a tetherball. The thing is, as word gets out ICE wants to buy some warehouse and turn it into a detention facility/concentration camp locals are raising hell. So are their elected officials, state elected officials and even Congress Critters. Rachel Maddow did a segment on this the other night. I noticed yesterday that a tiny town in Mississippi, MISSIPPI has given ICE/Noem the cold shoulder, as has the Governor and one of there (Republican of course) U.S. Senators! It’s not the only Red state saying no.
So ICE, and Team Trump is quietly doing what he so publicly made a BFD about – practicing ‘Catch and Release’, although as a pundit this afternoon said could more accurately be described as Catch, DETAIN an Release.’ I hope this gets followed up on and somewhere along the line the financial cost will be added up. Conservatives don’t give two-sh*ts about the human cost but if the financial tab is as big as I think it is they’re going to start caring and fast.
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
Dadgum I did something and lost my whole comment. I know this is a really serious topic. But.
“A growing number of judges slapping them around like a tetherball”. I chortled. And I’m adding it to my “Here Comes The Judge” list.
Thank you.
“Rachel Maddow did a segment on this the other night. I noticed yesterday that a tiny town in Mississippi, MISSIPPI has given ICE/Noem the cold shoulder, as has the Governor and one of there (Republican of course) U.S. Senators! It’s not the only Red state saying no.”
Probably the reason for the “no” was because these Drumpf supporters and enablers know exactly what will happen: That they get stuck with paying for everything the Feds should be paying for. Mississippi farms out a lot of its prisons to the “private” system (as do a number of other “red” states), including facilities that *officially* are “state prisons,” which allows the state to free up its budget for other purposes (and, remember that many of these states also MUST operate under “balanced budgets” meaning the state cannot run out of money for the fiscal year without undergoing proration–that’s a major reason why these states turn to the Feds after natural disasters because a swath of tornadoes or a big hurricane smashing through the state with at least three months still in the fiscal year can wipe out the state’s budget, resulting in state offices closing completely or employees having to work without pay until the end of the crisis and even if proration avoids such drastic situations, state offices may cut back to being open just one or two days a week and employees may get a fraction of their paychecks; some states do have funds that are officially supposed to be off-limits as they were intended for a specific use but the state may “raid” or “borrow” from those funds in emergencies but, interestingly, “emergencies” can crop up even when there aren’t any real emergencies–kind of like the way the Federal government has been borrowing from the Social Security funds for more than 40 years without fully repaying those funds). [Okay–went off on a big tangent there. Sorry. Back to the original point.]
Anyways, if the Feds don’t pay their share of maintaining THEIR facility, the State winds up having to cover the costs. While a “blue” state might have no problem taking Drumpf and his (mis)administration to recover their costs or force the Feds into paying for the Federal facility (which, of course, would never have been approved of in the first place–I don’t see any “blue state” governor agreeing to that, not even if Drumpf promised, even with a pinky swear, to restore all the funding he’s blocked from them), there is not a single “red” state governor that would even think of taking the Drumpfers to court (not this year, anyway, with 36 governorships up for grabs, split evenly among Ds and Rs, although Mississippi’s governor isn’t up for reelection; one of its two Senators, however, is so it’d be interesting to know which of its Senators said “no” to Drumpf). Even if the officials laid it out and told the truth that the Feds weren’t paying for their facility and the people of Mississippi had to pay for it, it wouldn’t matter to the brain-dead Drumpf-supporters in the red hats. Even if the officials told them, “We have to close this and cut that,” until those red-hats PERSONALLY were affected by the cuts, they wouldn’t care.