UPDATE (Frances Langum)
Trump is going to sign "something." Great.
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Monday, Kirstjen Nielson, White House aide who was elevated to Secretary of Homeland Security last year after John Kelly was moved to chief of staff, gave up whatever was left of her reputation yesterday by standing at the briefing room podium lying to the American people in a continuous stream. Most infuriating is her repeating ad nauseam that the brand new, cruel policy of separating children from parents who are fleeing violence and corruption in their home countries is not a policy, but a non-existent law passed by Democrats. This outrageous lie, whipped up by in-house white supremacist Stephen Miller and repeated continuously by Jeff Sessions and Trump himself, is shameful. To utter it from a White House podium is inexcusable.
Let’s be clear here – Nielson is lying when she says that she is “enforcing the laws passed by Congress”. Technically, she is correct, but her agency CREATED this problem, and then enforcing a law that doesn’t need to be used. Here’s how she is doing that: Refugees are coming to ports of entry to ask for asylum. They are being turned away at those ports of entry because ICE has slowed entry to a trickle. After days of waiting on bridges and in lines, they are crossing illegally in desperation, then turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents. THAT’S when the “zero tolerance” policy is at its most cruel; these refugees are then arrested, thus “enforcing the laws passed by Congress”, their children are taken by force because children can’t be jailed with their parents. This problem is wholly created by Trump and sycophants, then lied about from the podium of the White House briefing room. It’s immoral and criminal.
The UN Human Rights Office has condemned this new practice as unconscionable and declared it “state-sponsored child abuse”. Republicans have finally awoken from their gerrymandered-in coma and are now speaking out against this new policy. However, at the eye of this storm is Kirstjen Nielson, who is blatantly lying for Donald Trump trying to get back in his good graces after privately opposing this new policy. This is what I don’t get about people like Nielson who sell their souls to a cretin like Trump. What do they gain from that? Why are they clinging to likely the most immoral president in US history? How do people like Nielson sleep at night? How can they do this day after day? What are they planning on doing AFTER destroying their own reputations and then being cast aside?
Whatever rationalization Nielson adopted to justify this, it’s our duty, as Americans, to hound her out of office. Maybe we can’t get rid of Trump (yet), but we can certainly deprive him of the tools he uses to prosecute his idiotic policies and repeat his lies and enable his immoral conduct.
