Originally published at: Congress Throws More Money at Removing Immigrants than Most Countries Spend on Their Armies - TPM – Talking Points Memo
It’s hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country’s immigration enforcement infrastructure. The Bureau of Prisons? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The Marine Corps? Bigger even than that, by some estimates. All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to…
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With the bill being into law, the U.S. is now fully a police state. While kicking out undocumented migrants are the first target, we are next. They seek to fill the concentration camps with “denaturalized” Americans and native born citizens who dissent from the Trump regime.
On a personal note, I am a dual citizen of Greece. I did it because I saw during Trump 1.0 what is coming. My wife and adult children are applying for Greek citizenship as soon as the paperwork are in order. My grandparents came to America and it’s possible if it becomes bad enough here for me to spend my retirement years in a country my family left in the early 20th century. My children and their spouses could live anywhere in the E.U. as Greek citizens and their families. It’s a reverse migration.
I never thought this could happen until recently.
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Today’s Heather. Paul’s taking the 4th off.
Moved our son into Toronto last night. Canadian border personnel could not have been more warmly respectful. Mortifyingly embarrased to be an American by what our government has become and is doing.
Will we live up to our era’s attack on our founding principles? Washington trusted in Providence to establish those principles in the despairing, darkest days of defeat in NY in 1776. Lincoln called on our “better angels” to deliver a just victory for those principles in 1865. Now it’s our turn. We dare not despair if we hope to rise to the challenge. Police states have been defeated. We must smash ours with solidarity.
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I hope Canada joins the European Union— which could happen if the U.S. descent into fascism continues. Then my family can just move to Canada like your son has (intelligently) done.
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I can’t help but think that while all the federal government’s time, resources, and money are being overwhelming directed towards terrorizing immigrants, that America’s homegrown criminals (who have always outnumber undocumented immigrant criminals) are going to feel emboldened to go about their merry way.
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Russia used to have a problem with immigrants from Central Asia, but the attraction for migrants has faded since it included the possibility of being hustled off to the Ukraine front. And as for problematic oligarchs and business execs? High buildings and gravity do the job.
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I believe there is a positive side to this, because it will hurt Trump and the R’s more than it will help them. In recent polling, voters support immigration control in the abstract, but they don’t support how it’s being done by ICE with police state tactics. They don’t support immigrants being dragged off to detention when they are here on temporary legal status and have committed no crimes.
There will be a bottom-up reaction as people see this being done more often in their local communities, and I have to believe this will help us in the midterm elections.
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Very simply, since they cannot use the military against citizens, the GOP has voted to create a military but course not call it that. And, they say it is against immigrants, but of course it will not only be about that either.
It seems we have the beginnings of a militarized force against the people of our country because the GOP intend to take it by force. Obviously, I am driven to conclude the GOP thinks it would lose any elections going forward.
What they may not have considered is just how big the country is. Occupying Afghanistan or Iraq would be cake walks to what they are trying to pull off, and at least there our actual military was not going be created from scratch to try to do so. Another dumb dangerous idea by dumb dangerous folk.
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“It’s hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country’s immigration enforcement infrastructure.”
… … … … … … …
Just call ICE… “Gestapo”
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President Trump is enacting a mass deportation campaign promised to be the largest in U.S. history. New data is giving a clearer picture of exactly what that looks like: at least 56,000 immigrants are being held in ICE detention.
According to the Deportation Data Project, a group that collects immigration numbers, about half the people in detention don’t have criminal convictions. That’s close to 30,000 people in detention, without a criminal record — the group that has grown the most in recent months.
“You listen to Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, they’re saying things like they are going after the worst of the worst, the people who are murderers,” says UCLA Professor Graeme Blair, referring to President Trump’s ‘Border czar’ Tom Homan and key White House Aide Stephen Miller. “That’s just not what the data says about the people that they are actually arresting.”
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Trumps private military force, arresting even Congress Critters. It wont belong before Trump uses this force against private citizens.
Is there any check on this force?
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These conservatives have gone too far to relinquish control now, there will never be an honest election again in America. The only reason Biden was elected was the conservatives did not cheat hard enough, conservatives will never make that mistake again. The bottom line is conservatives are done with any system that requires them to share the levers of wealth and power with the folks they despise and they will now embark on their version of the final solution, culling America of anyone who interferes with their agenda of domination or hording the levers of wealth and power.
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I need to understood why the MSM (I know, I jest) ask these guys, where’s the proof that “these people are murderers”? Did they commit crimes in their home country or here? If there why weren’t they tried? If here, how did they get in the country or at least why not try them now?
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Of the near 60,000 people being held by ICE, 79 so far, are charged with assaulting ICE when arrested. Kristi Noem tweeted a post screaming of 700% increase from the year before. There is no real check on ICE. Stories abound that there is no due process. The point of this is to terrorize us into being orderly and dominated and accepting of “authority”. Eventually people will resist.
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I’m not that pessimistic about elections for a couple of reasons. First, the states run elections, not the Federal government. The U.S. is a mix of Red States, Blue States, and Purple swing states. Conservatives only fully control how elections are run in one of those categories, where they control the legislature, the Attorney General’s office and the Governorship.
They don’t have that power in Blue states. And they don’t have that power in Purple states where there is a mix of party control and Democrats can keep a close eye on their election process.
The other reason I’m not that pessimistic, is that Trump’s agenda is to break things and move fast. Getting as much done as he can in the first year before the midterms, because he knows there will be massive blowback on what he’s doing.
The plan is to make as much as he can irreversible before a potential Democratic controlled Congress after the midterms can stop him from doing more damage (that, and the courts eventually stopping him). If Trump and his Project 2025 handlers had a plan to insure there would never be an honest election again, it wouldn’t look like this.
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To note that anyone employed by this administration* is lying is both redundant and repetitive.
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Maybe it’s just rehearsal for the Big Show. I have a friend who hiked out of Chile over the Andes in 1973 following Pinochet’s US-backed coup. His crime was being a college student. A number of his fellow students made the fatal error of staying behind in Santiago. One of his fellow escapees, who also ended up in Scandinavia, was the son of a banker and a member of the “Radical Party”. It was a very small party at the time and supported some of the policy ideas of Juan I, the king of Spain. It was traditionally a moderate-right party focused on Church issues. The Radicals had split with the right-wing element supporting Pinochet and the rest aligning with Allende’s left-wing government. Tim Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator, would have fit in perfectly. It was a very unradical radical party. In any case, the word “radical” and support for the Allende coalition was enough to get him and his wife on the “disappear” list. This was a college student with two personal butlers and a driver. The experience changed the lives of all Chilean refugees. My friend, now 72, eventually came to terms with his country’s descent into right-wing insanity. I imagine many teens and 20-somethings in the US could face similar dangers in the US just for their ideas or affiliations.
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Already starting…With the Homegrown Criminal in Chief! He has own song all ready to go – Hail to the President! Hail to the Thief!
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He’s building a personal army, populated with right-wing nationalists, wanna-be military washouts, and militia members.
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I think the term is “Kosplay Kops”.
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