Send the Marines

I'd been wondering if Hegseth was freelancing, volunteering out of the blue when he said on Saturday he was ready to deploy Marines to Los Angeles, the project sounding so off the wall, even more illegal than the National Guard proposal, and I had trouble imagining they'd allow Trump to call him up and ask for them. "Hey Pete! They're burning down Los Angeles! Send the Marines!" And indeed, on the Sunday, Trump didn't seem to have heard of it, suggesting, as he often does when asked about some abuse that he hasn't thought about, that he hadn't made any decisions but definitely could if he felt like it: 

When asked what the threshold is for sending in the Marines, Mr. Trump said Sunday: "The bar is what I think it is."

If I'm reading that right, he was saying the only consideration would be the presidential will. When he found out how he felt, what he wanted to happen, that would be the thing that would happen.

Wall Street Journal (gift link) confirms what you probably have been suspecting, that the ICE push over last week in Southern California, where they raided garment factories and warehouses, car washes (nabbing customers as well as workers) and at least one day care center (where they grabbed a mom dropping off her four-year-old), climaxing with Friday's and Saturday's assaults on Home Depot parking lots in Westlake and Paramount, was engineered by Reichskommissar Stephen Miller as part of a general strategic shift away from trying to deport gang members and criminals to deporting any unauthorized immigrants at all.

The somewhat amusing part is that it was motivated by jealousy, of Joe Biden:

For the Record: Del Rio Truthers

 

Bringing takeout from Ciudad Acuña to the family in Del Rio. Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images via The Guardian.

Has anyone actually looked into this? https://t.co/JqYTGaTcn0

— Don Winslow (@donwinslow) September 24, 2021

From article: "And so this is a community that, you know, operates through word of mouth. So people started saying, hey, Ciudad Acuña is open. This port is open."

— 1984_brien (@1984_brien) September 24, 2021

That's according to Politifact. This is an international matter and as such would seem that much of the US IC can analyze what went on here and in other situations where refuge movements are encouraged.

— 1984_brien (@1984_brien) September 24, 2021

It wasn't exactly sudden. They were on the way, mostly concentrated in Panama, in July 2020. Something like what would have been called a "caravan" six or seven years ago https://t.co/CizuiHXIue

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 25, 2021

Obviously the fact that Trump was being replaced by a less racist and anti-immigrant president encouraged more people to join in from January 2021 onward, but the movement was already happening.

Daddy, Where Do Border Patrols Come From?

 

Photo via Veterans Administration website We Are the Mighty.

Reaction from a veteran border agent: “It will make patrolling extremely difficult, along with security. This is insane. The agents did nothing wrong. It makes me furious. Horses have been used since before the official founding of the Border Patrol.” https://t.co/FsFPyZRHNC

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) September 23, 2021

I know now what unconscious process made me look up the official founding of the Border Patrol when I saw that tweet, not because I already knew about it, but because I didn't know about it and wondered why—I've often dipped into the history of immigration and immigration enforcement on the blog, and you'd think I would have heard of how the Border Patrol got started.

The main reason I hadn't heard about it, as it turns out, was that it happened at the same time as everything else, in 1924, during the Coolidge administration, when they passed the first general immigration law in the form of the National Origins Act; before that, the Mexican border was essentially open, Mexican and US citizens going back and forth across the border freely, unhindered except by customs agents collecting import duties on both sides. 

For the Record: Debate Takes

 

The Debate (2017), by the Filipino painter Gerry Joquico, via ArtAnton.

Earlier in the evening, I had a kind of kerfuffle with our dear friend Bos over the framing of our attack on Trump's China business, where I think the prevailing rhetoric emphasizes the points that aren't important at all for the sake of a sound bite that really doesn't end up meaning anything:

Hard to say how it means something important. Certainly the one thing he did with the account deserves a lot of investigation, but it's not ready to publish. pic.twitter.com/G7DmBxi9ao

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 22, 2020

I don't know. Many people have foreign accounts. He disclosed it to IRS. He pays more in taxes because Chinese law is more effective against tax dodging.

He doesn't keep a lot of money in it. Except that one time he seems to have laundered $15+ million. That part is interesting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 22, 2020

I had a Singapore checking account for a couple of years after I came back to the States, and I really didn't mean any harm.

ICE raids: Where were the criminals?

Photo by Rogelio V. Solis/AP/Shutterstock used, as it happens, by Mr. Pierce, who reminds us of who did not get arrested on Wednesday, namely any of the actual criminals, the executives of the chicken-processing plants that illegally gave jobs to these workers.

1

I'm so old I remember when these massive ICE raids were being publicized as a stab at purging the violent criminal element in our midst, way back, oh, almost four weeks ago:

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted upcoming immigration raids set to begin this weekend will focus primarily on deporting criminals though he acknowledged his administration will target anyone who entered the country illegally.

“We’re really looking for criminals as much as we can. Trying to find the criminal population, which has been coming into this country the last 10 years,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to depart Washington. He touted his administration’s removal of members of the violent gang MS-13, claiming he’d deported them “by the thousands.”

Of course they had to scotch the operation after that, once again, but on Wednesday President Blabbermouth was able to restrain himself, or rather they managed to hide it from him, and don't mind admitting it—

Donald don't do this number—

—it's the only one you own...

There was a pretty funky smell, I thought, to the remarks on NPR of acting ICE director Mark Morgan on the subject of his agency's plan for a big sweep of some thousands of undocumented immigrant families starting Sunday:

"My duty is not to look at the political optics, or the will [of] the American people, that's for the politicians to decide," Morgan said. "What the American people should want us to do as law enforcement officials is to enforce the rule of law and maintain the integrity of that system."

Did he mean there was some special reason for enforcing the rule of law this weekend, as opposed to the rest of the time? Launched Monday by an out-of-the-blue presidential tweet (the night before he officially opened his reelection bid in Orlando)?

Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people.......

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019

No politics there for sure! Though there did seem to be some kind of alleged reason, in Morgan's telling: