By: Tracy Carrothers – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.
Can he do that? Yes, he can and he is.
Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced yesterday that National Guard would deploy to the US-Mexico border. Details were not given. There were no numbers of troops to be deployed nor were the financials shared.
Trump stated this is a “big step” and one that “hasn’t been done before.” His claims, as often is the case, are not true. President George W. Bush sent troops in 2006 and President Obama in 2010. Each time the deployment was costly and not exactly effective. Super, let’s try it again.
Under Federal law the troops are limited in the role they can take. The Posse Comitatus Act signed by President Rutherford B. Hayes restricts the military from being deployed to enforce domestic laws.
The troops can stay within the law by working in limited ways to support the Customs and Border Patrol operations. In prior deployments troops worked on surveillance, construction and repair of fences, and training.
What is the difference here? Well, the strong anti-immigrant policy from Trump and his advisors, the ignorance and/or disrespect for the law, a failure of there being anyone present around Trump to pull him in when he acts reactively and without accurate information. Those, among other concerns, do fire up concerns that we are headed down a slippery slope, led by a fact ignoring, law circumventing, hot head who is advised by white rage fueled Stephen Miller, FOX News exploitation of the caravan story, and Anne Coulter who pushed the idea last month on FOX.
Miller, described by Lindsey Graham as a barrier to getting a compromise immigration reform and an outlier, takes Trumps hot takes and FOX news fueled rants to spin them into policy and practical action. That is frightening.
Where will this take us? Further down an authoritarian road. A president who praises China’s killing of 200 pro-democracy protesters as a use of “strength” and praises the President of the Philippines who oversees a drug war that includes extrajudicial killings of drug dealers is not someone we can trust to use restraint in a domestic military deployment that walks a fine line of legality in the first place.
The most maddening piece of this is that Trump’s ramped up rhetoric and his recent twitter rage manufactures a crisis – they don’t match the actual numbers. The number of people crossing the border illegally is historically low and the DHS recently reported the border is as secure as it has ever been. What gives?
Well, without using fear mongering and scapegoating who is he? It is his go-to way to rally support from his base. Creating a scary false narrative featuring brown or black people as the villains continuously works to appease and rally his most deplorable supporters.
And in all of this we are back to the same place we always end up in this presidency: possible life threatening consequences for brown people. In this political game that fires up his base with racial tensions and a false narrative based on fear, the humanity of those who are seeking a better, safer life is tossed aside. There will always be bad actors in this world, but to paint a whole group of people as dangerous, criminals, as invaders shows a lack of a level of compassion and empathy that chills me.
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