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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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As the Trump administration faces growing public and political backlash over the separation of families at the US–Mexico border, another front is opening up in the courts.
A Guatemalan woman who crossed into the United States in May seeking asylum filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Washington, DC, challenging her separation from her 7-year-old son. The case is believed to be the first lawsuit challenging family separations since Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero-tolerance" policy in April, directing US Attorneys Offices to pursue all alleged illegal entry cases referred by the US Department of Homeland Security.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Tuesday that New York planned to file a "multi-agency lawsuit" against the administration alleging family separations are unconstitutional; no case has been filed yet.
When @wolfblitzer asks whether the separation policy is humane, the ICE director pauses, hesitates and doesn't answer. Only saying: "It's the law."
He threatened the press, joked about ruling for life and bullied everyone, including the allies who helped him get into office, while enjoying a cult following among his base. When a special judicial investigation threatened to reveal his financial corruption and complicity in criminal acts, he did not hesitate to destroy the democracy he led to remain in power.
Benito Mussolini created the world’s first Fascist dictatorship not just as a counter to the powerful Italian left — that’s a well-known story — but also as a desperate act to avoid prosecution. His time https://www.amazon.com/Mussolini-Dennis-Mack-Smith/dp/0394506944 (as prime minister of a coalition government) (Oct. 31, 1922-Jan. 3, 1925) offers lessons in how democracies die and autocracies are born.
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To save himself, Mussolini took the plunge into dictatorship, announcing in January 1925 that he and his party were above the law. “If Fascism has been a criminal association, I am the head of that criminal association,” he told Parliament, letting them know that the window to unseat him had closed. Amid the slew of repressive legislation that followed, Mussolini pardoned all political criminals and fired the two magistrates overseeing the investigation, replacing them with loyalists who issued a verdict of involuntary rather than willful murder. He ruled without limits to his power for 18 more years.
Much in this sad tale may sound familiar to those who have watched President Trump degrade the culture and institutions of American democracy and seek to eliminate anyone who obstructs the expansion of his power. From his calls to have his political opponent in the 2016 election, Hilary Clinton, imprisoned, to his https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comey-misstated-key-clinton-email-evidence-at-hearing-say-people-close-to-investigation/2017/05/09/074c1c7e-34bd-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html?utm_term=.12057e3c0a86 (firing) of FBI Director James B. Comey, Trump has followed the authoritarian playbook first written by Mussolini.
And of course Trump, too, is plagued by an investigation: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in his election. Trump’s recent contention that he has the “absolute right” to pardon himself, discussions of his loyalists about firing Mueller or worse, and the (quickly retracted) comment of his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, that Trump could murder Comey and escape prosecution not only illuminate the president’s horizon of anti-democratic possibilities but also open a door that leads directly to the origins of dictatorial rule.
While Trump is no fascist in the historical sense — one-party states aren’t needed today to rule as an autocrat — he proves that some rules of strongman behavior haven’t changed: Always warn people what you’re going to do to them, and, for maximum intimidation, be sure to refer to your personal capacity for violence and criminality. Mussolini would have applauded Trump’s January 2016 boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any followers: It told America that if he were to be elected, no one would be able to hold him accountable. Trump has been clear about his admiration for autocrats of regimes past and present who have stopped at nothing — even declaring dictatorship — to derail processes of justice that would threaten their power.
“He speaks and his people sit up at attention,” Trump recently said of North Korean dictator Kim Jung-un. “I want my people to do the same.” It is indeed high time for Americans to sit up and listen carefully when the president tells them what he would like to do to expand his authority, whether it is removing limits on his time to govern, censoring the media or putting his political opponents in jail. We can’t protect our republic if we don’t take seriously those who threaten it, especially when they behave in such a chillingly similar fashion to those who have destroyed democracy in the past.
Trump administration officials have been sending babies and other young children forcibly separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border to at least three “tender age” shelters in South Texas, The Associated Press has learned.
Lawyers and medical providers who have visited the Rio Grande Valley shelters described play rooms of crying preschool-age children in crisis. The government also plans to open a fourth shelter to house hundreds of young migrant children in Houston, where city leaders denounced the move Tuesday.
Since the White House announced its zero tolerance policy in early May, more than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, resulting in a new influx of young children requiring government care. The government has faced withering critiques over images of some of the children in cages inside U.S. Border Patrol processing stations.
Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.
“The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides foster care and other child welfare services to migrant children. “Toddlers are being detained.”
As furor grows in the United States over a new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all illegal immigrants and separating them from their children, immigrant detention camps are under close scrutiny. Photos issued by the US government have revealed rows of cage-like steel-wire enclosures for the removed children, drawing comparisons to concentration camps.
The government says outrage over its actions is misplaced. In a press briefing yesterday, Kirstjen Nielsen said that the children “are being well taken care of.” She added, “The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement provides meals, medical care, and educational services to these children. They are provided temporary shelter.”
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What is a concentration camp?
“When people hear the phrase ‘concentration camps,'”Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,tells Quartz, “they think of Nazi death camps, particularly Auschwitz, because the horrors unleashed during the Nazis’ genocide surpassed human imagining in the annals of atrocity. That period so starkly redefined what a camp was that the earlier versions have been forgotten.”
But the world, she said, had a 40-year history of concentration camps prior to the Nazi regime. Those earlier camps actually set the stage for German death camps by promoting “the idea that extrajudicial detention could be done humanely.”
Concentration camps, she adds, aren’t necessarily violent. Historically, they were “a place for mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, citizenship, or political affiliation.”
Andrea Pitzer was working on her first book, a biography of Vladimir Nabokov, when she encountered a reference to one of his characters being held in a prison camp in Russia during World War I.
It was not something she'd seen previous scholars address, and when she went looking for a general history of such camps, she couldn't find one — so she wrote One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.
The Nazi death camps are a crucial part of that history, of course, but Pitzer reveals how the basic principles of the extrajudicial mass internment of civilians had been laid out nearly a half-century earlier and how, for most of the last century, there has not been a day without at least one concentration camp somewhere on the planet.
