They. Have. A. Choice. They could have said “oh, shit, there’s no soap, toothpaste or blankets. Better rectify that situation.” But no. They’ve decided to advertise their cruelty. To fight for the right to be cruel.
Neither you as a person nor the government needs to defend against every action taken against you. They could have easily avoided this, simply by basic supplies, probably at a lesser cost than arguing in court whether they needed to provide them. It doesn’t mean that later on when someone sues them for not providing game systems, that they are obligated to capitulate on that demand.
Isn’t funny how aggressively the Trump regime is doing everything they can to roll back all the good things Obama did while in office, but when it comes to the shitty things his administration did like drone strikes or immigration hard-lining they are all “yeah, but Obama!” and powerless to fix it?
Yes, everyone, better make sure you get all your facts straight before you decide to help children. After all, somewhere a conservative might start disagreeing with liberals.
In 2017, during the Trump administration, [US District Judge Dolly Gee] found that CBP failed to provide adequate food and water to minors, that it did not maintain the facilities at adequate temperatures, and that it deprived the minors of sleep by confining them on concrete floors under bright lights. Gee also found that CBP’s obligation to provide “safe and sanitary” conditions included providing soap, dry towels, showers, toothbrushes, and dry clothes.
(Emphasis added.)
The United States’s loathsome argument—that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights—is morally indefensible… And even though the litigation began under the Obama administration, it was the Trump administration that elected to bring this appeal and ask the court to bless these inhumane conditions as “safe and sanitary.” That’s an extremely aggressive legal argument, and one that suggests that the disturbing conditions being reported at confinement centers are intentional, not a sign of mere neglect.
(Emphasis in original.)
It turns out that this particular DoJ lawyer has form.
Trump will depart; the problem will not depart with him. This administration is merely the latest one to subject immigrant children to abusive conditions. It’s been 35 years since Jenny Flores was strip-searched in an adult facility. Before Sarah Fabian defended concrete floors and bright lights for President Donald Trump, she defended putting kids in solitary confinement for President Barack Obama.
That will happen no matter what, and in bad faith on top of it. With the context also left out and distorted.
I cringe every time I read a tweet or comment like “Obama did it too”.
Which is wrong on many levels. Both objectively, that Obama did the same cruelty, which is in bad faith trying to equate the two.
And, and this is more important, even if Obama (or Hillary or whomever) did exactly the same cruel and illegal thing, that doesn’t excuse it now. If it does anything, it just reinforces the need to STOP DOING IT now.
When I see those tweets, I simply block the person. There will never be a tweat worth reading from someone who thinks it’s OK to be shitty because someone else was shitty before already. I like to think that if someone has enough blocks, Twitter might ban them at some point. (Do not tell me it doesn’t work that way, my fantasy land is better than real Twitter.)
PS:This story isn’t fake news. It’s not an Obama violation that today children are not being held safely, even if holding them safely was an Obama agreement. Breaking it TODAY is 100% a Trump thing, bonus for breaking it worse than why it was originally agreed to. And it’s a Trump official all the way down from him to the head of DHS to the management team to the supervisor to the lawyer at the bottom of the pile. Who, unfortunate for them, their job changed and it’s a bigger ask for them to quit or not do there job than for someone else to participate in a protest or simply call and write they congressman. But, at the end of the day, doesn’t matter if she agrees or not with the idea, she still argued in court that the cruelty was not a violation of providing safe care.
This whole conversation about the responsibility of legal officials brings to mind the 1961 movie “Judgement at Nuremberg” and the 1947 Judges’ Trial it was based on. In these still-early stages of American concentration camps, I think of this exchange from the movie:
Ernst Janning [imprisoned judge of the Nazi regime, formerly a respected international legal scholar]: Judge Haywood… the reason I asked you to come: Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it, You must believe it!
Judge Dan Haywood [chief judge at tribunal]: Herr Janning, it “came to that” the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.
If you’re a government lawyer arguing that children imprisoned by the state you serve don’t need soap, toothbrushes, or proper beds to sleep in … it’s come to that. You don’t get to hide behind “zealously defending your client” anymore.
No no no! We should say lots about lots! And there’s lots to say! There’s a whole shitload of truth out there that supports your position. You don’t have to sell your soul in the same way they do. They want to “own the libtards” with no regard for reality. We hold our heads up as thinking humans.
You (and everyone else here jumping down my throat) are right about what’s happening to asylum-seekers on the border. It’s an inexcusable nightmare. We have a moral obligation to do otherwise. We should shine a light on it however we can.
Yeah. So much of our political discourse is focused on the defense of party or ingroup, when it should be about crafting a much more inclusive and sustainable society…
How is pointing out what the woman said, while she was working for a particular administration “selling my soul”? This isn’t a dissertation defense, you know, it’s the internet…
And I could say literally everything with a mountain of factual evidence and citations to back me up. They don’t care. That’s the whole point. Even when we’re scrupulously accurate, they do the exact same thing.
What PRECISELY are you taking issue with? That she’s NOT working for the current administration in her capacity as a lawyer? Because she is. That fact that she worked for the Obama administration, too, doesn’t mean that’s not the case.
And BTW, @markfrauenfelder updated the post to reflect how long this issue has been doing on (since the Obama administration). So what precisely, do you have issue with? Just because she’s making a narrow legal argument, doesn’t mean it’s not in defense of a particularly cruel policy.
I honestly don’t think it’s that weird. Or maybe it’s weird, but we should expect it, because of how powerful self deception is.
To take the opposite case, there are a whole lot of liberals who didn’t cry out when Obama did these things. We care about it now because, basically, we trusted that Obama had good intentions, and we trust that Trump has bad ones.
This is a totally fair point, and I share your frustration.
I guess I just think (or maybe I just want to believe) that it’s not a monolithic “they.” Some of them will do the exact same thing, but some won’t. If you’re right, there’s no hope, and I want to hope.
“a whole lot of liberals who didn’t cry out when Obama did these things”
Really? Take a look at our Obama coverage. We are pretty liberal and we cried out like stuck pigs when Obama did shitty things. And if you look at The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic. Harper’s, at that time you won’t see them giving Obama a pass.
And the ones that WILL do that WILL do that. Not all conservatives are doxxing asshole trolley trash, but the ones that are ARE. We’re not saying “all conservatives” or even “all trump supporters”. We’re saying “all the people who engage in this behavior” - because they are engaging in that behavior.
[ETA] And of course, THE CURRENT PRESIDENT engaged in this behavior himself…
How did “rational immigration control advocates” come into it. I thought this thread was about the Government’s arguments. This administration is not approaching immigration (or anything else, really) from an at all rational perspective.
After you changed them first. You were the first to bring up “rational immigration-control advocates”.
I’ve heard of these people, these rational immigration control advocates, whose arguments and methods are not motivated by bigotry and xenophobia, but they KEEP TURNING OUT TO BE NAZIS
