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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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WASHINGTON—U. S. President Donald Trump has been painting a wildly inaccurate picture of human trafficking in his effort to sell a border wall that would not make a meaningful difference in fighting the problem, experts on trafficking say.
Over the past two weeks, Trump has repeatedly told lurid stories about women being “thrown into the back seat of a car, or thrown into a van with no windows, with no form of air,” and smuggled over undefended parts of the border with “tape over their mouths, electrical tape.”
“They tape their face, their hair, their hands behind their back, their legs. They put them in the back seat of cars and vans, and they go — they don’t come in through your port of entry, because you’d see them. You couldn’t do that,” he said in his speech to the American Farm Bureau on Monday.
Six trafficking experts from around the U.S. told the Star that they had met no trafficking victims who had suffered anything like the experience Trump described.
These experts said such border kidnappings might occur on rare occasions but are, at most, extremely uncommon — a tiny fraction not only of all U.S. trafficking cases, many of which involve U.S. citizens who never cross a border, but of the subset of cases involving women brought in through Mexico.
A high proportion of trafficked Latin American women, the experts said, come into the country legally, on U.S. visas. Others enter illegally but are not bound and gagged, nor driven in vehicles through remote unfenced areas.
“Either he’s watching action films or he’s watching some other type of movie that involves handcuffs and tape over people’s mouths. But in neither case is it based in any reality of what individuals helping trafficking victims see,” said Lori Cohen, director of the Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Sanctuary for Families, a New York service provider for sex trafficking victims.
“His depiction of human trafficking is practically unrecognizable to those of us who have spent decades in the trenches combating these abuses,” said Martina Vandenberg, president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center.
“I have never had a case where someone’s mouth was taped up and they were brought across the border in the way the president described. Could it ever happen? Of course. But I’ve worked hundreds of human trafficking cases, and what the president describes, that’s just not what my life looks like in this work,” said Bridgette Carr, director of the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School.
Trump has also claimed that a border wall could “eliminate” human trafficking from Mexico, or at least “90, 95 per cent; a tremendous percentage would stop.” This is not even close to accurate, the experts said, given how traffickers use the visa system.
#AOC
On Saturday night, we sat with my mother in the hospice ward of Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey. My brother, exhausted from hours at her side, had gone home to walk his dog. My sister spooned melting chocolate ice cream from a Styrofoam cup into my mother’s mouth. My wife stroked her hair.
My mother, possessed of one of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever known, was disoriented, her body failing her in her 90th year. On the television, which in the presence of my mother was always set to a news channel, a documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg played and somehow for a fleeting moment, a spark returned to Mom’s eye.
My mother was a member of the forgotten but nonetheless still heroic majority of the greatest generation: its women. The men went to war. They died and sacrificed and were celebrated as heroes. But the women did something every bit as extraordinary. They advanced the transformation of the role of women, a transformation begun by their own mothers’ generation. And they did it in a world resisting them at every turn.
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Mom did not have much use for organized religion. But she did believe fiercely in the ability of our political system to combat ills like Trump. In the end, nothing so preoccupied or motivated her. Because she saw him not just as corrupt or traitorous, but as an enemy of the work of her mother, her husband, her generation and her own life, as an undoer of great goods and as an obstacle to future progress. She died loved by children and grandchildren, admired by friend and colleagues, but still with an inspiring degree of fierce hatred for the president and his ilk in her heart. And for that, and infinitely more, I will always love her.
WASHINGTON — American troops were among 15 people killed on Wednesday in a suicide bombing in northern Syria that was claimed by the Islamic State, just weeks after President Trump ordered the withdrawal of United States forces with what he declared the extremist group’s defeat.
The attack targeted a restaurant in the northern city of Manbij where American soldiers would sometimes stop to eat during their patrols of the area, residents said. After the blast, a number of Americans were evacuated by helicopter, they said. It was not immediately clear how many had been in the area at the time of the blast.
A statement by the Baghdad-based American headquarters for the fight against the Islamic State said the attack happened while the troops were on a patrol.
“U.S. service members were killed during an explosion while conducting a routine patrol in Syria today,” said the statement, which was posted on Twitter. “We are still gathering information and will share additional details at a later time.”
To say House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has mastered the art of dealing with President Trump would be a gross understatement. She fact-checked him in the Oval Office on live TV and passed spending bills to reopen the government, thereby reinforcing Trump’s responsibility for the shutdown. To top it off, she’s taking away the president’s TV. More precisely, in response to Trump’s nearly month-long temper tantrum, she has told him https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/16/pelosi-asking-trump-postpone-his-state-union-is-her-latest-power-play-this-shutdown-impasse/?utm_term=.f0e8a03e02e7 (he won’t get his prime-time State of the Union address) on Jan. 29.
You wonder why in the world Democrats ever considered replacing her. She knows she has power, she willingly and skillfully deploys it, and, as she has said, as a mother of 5 children, knows how to handle a toddler’s meltdown. She also knows what Trump craves most — attention and TV cameras. (Remember, he couldn’t stand it when she had the limelight on Jan. 3 so felt compelled to enter the White House briefing room — but take no questions.)
Ultimately, Pelosi’s power rests on the unity of her members and the Democratic base — and the president’s dwindling power and popularity. According to the latest Pew Research Center poll, “the majority of Americans (58%) continue to oppose substantially expanding the border wall, while 40% favor the proposal. . . . Overwhelming shares of both liberal Democrats (97%) and conservative and moderate Democrats (89%) oppose expanding the border wall.” Trump’s failed Oval Office speech shows he’s unable to move public opinion.
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We don’t know how this will end, but should the shutdown create a serious safety hazard or take a big chunk out of the economy, there is little doubt who’s going to get the blame. And Pelosi knows it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The No. 2 Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives said on Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s planned annual address to Congress is off, citing the partial government shutdown.
“The State of the Union is off,” U.S. Representative Steny Hoyer said in an interview with CNN. Hoyer said that as Speaker of the House, U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi is the one who invites the president and she has said, “as long as government is shut down we are not going to be doing business as usual.”
