Informed

Reading Time: 12 minutes The Trump administration likes to cite statistics from areas where barriers have already been built, followed by a drop in apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants.

That’s how it’s supposed to work — because the wall was designed to get them to go somewhere else.

The purpose of physical barriers is what border agents call “funneling” — pushing people to cross where they can be more easily apprehended by Border Patrol.

That funneling can be helpful to ensure that Border Patrol agents catch as many people as possible, or to focus them on tracking more sophisticated criminal efforts.

But that doesn’t mean that you can reduce the overall number of people coming into the US by building as much wall as possible.

Reading Time: 12 minutes Finally, there is the hope — naïve though it may seem — that some Republicans will choose to act on principle. There now exists a small club of former Trump administration officials who were widely respected before joining the administration and whom Trump has sullied, to greater or lesser degrees. It includes Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster and Jim Mattis. Imagine if one of them gave a television interview and told the truth about Trump. Doing so would be a service to their country at a time of national need. It would be an illustration of duty.

Reading Time: 6 minutes Like what I can only presume was the vast majority of black America, I spent a significant portion of the past weekend either watching the dream hampton produced/directed Lifetime docuseries, Surviving R. Kelly or talking about it. The discussions dominated social media and actual face-to-face interactions with people. Nothing in recent memory did such a thorough job, or had the space to lay out such a bulletproof case as to why one Robert Sylvester Kelly ain’t shit. 

Reading Time: 5 minutes Due to a combination of changed demographics and improved economic conditions, the era of large-scale illegal migration by Mexicans to the U.S. – the reason cited for building a wall – is over. Today, in a phenomenon that began in the past five years, most of the people apprehended at the border are from Central America and reflect primarily the violent conditions in those countries.

Reading Time: 4 minutes I’ve seen firsthand the impact hate speech, under the guise of free speech, can have. As a child in Nazi Germany, I saw young boys and girls being indoctrinated into becoming mass murderers of their neighbors. Later I learned how grown men, destroyed by fear, were rendered incapable of protecting their loved ones. I learned that a crowd could be moved to heinous actions.