Lying coward Trump
The only thing worse than the nauseating cruelty of President Trump’s immigration policy — captured perfectly by the agonizing stories of young children forcefully being separated from their parents at the border — is the craven dishonesty with which he attempts to sell it to the American people.
In January, Trump told a bipartisan group of House and Senate leaders that he’d sign any policy they put together to save from deportation the hundreds of thousands of undocumented “Dreamers” brought to the United States as minors. Watch it again on C-Span: He said he wanted a “bill of love.”
In subsequent weeks, Trump reneged — rejecting the bipartisan Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals plan senators returned to the White House while insisting on increasingly restrictionist language on legal immigration. After moving the goalposts and paying off the refs, he then blamed Democrats for refusing to play ball.
That cynical deceitfulness has now metastasized. Friday, of a policy that has separated 2,000 children from their parents, Trump said, “I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That’s their law.”
False. False. False. A bipartisan 2008 law merely gave the government flexibility in processing border-crossing immigrants.
In March 2017, then-Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly said he was considering expanding family separation. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed, “If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally.”
But wait, there’s more. This week, House GOP leaders — facing a rebellion from moderates trying to force a DACA vote via a parliamentary device — announced that they would bring two bills for a vote. The White House previously indicated support for the more moderate option, which includes $25 billion for Trump’s wall, a path to legalization for Dreamers and supposedly ends family separation.
Friday, Trump flipped, saying he wouldn’t sign it, then flipped again. Given the track record, why believe anything he says?
Dreamers, innocent children, good-faith legislators, ordinary Americans who demand sane immigration policies: the casualties of Trump’s sabotage pile up by the day.