News broke yesterday that the US will stop deporting illegal immigrants who were brought to the US as children, and that this will be accomplished via an order from the Department of Homeland Security.

Four short years ago, I was one of the many people heaping criticism on George Bush for using non-congressional means and abusing executive orders in an effort to bypass Congress in implementing the conservative agenda. (According to the National Archives, Bush issued 291 executive orders during his presidency.) 

It doesn’t seem like a huge win to me to see Barack Obama doing the same thing. (Don’t get me wrong, though, I think this cause is noble and I support finding means to end illegal immigration by integrating people into our population.)

Even if the House has effectively become a committee to sabotage Obama’s presidency, seeing liberals use these kinds of tactics worries me tremendously.  We have multiple branches of government precisely to protect against unilateral exercises of power such as this, and such actions on the part of liberals validate the troubling expansion of executive power we experienced under George Bush. (and make us look like a bunch of hypocrites for criticizing George Bush’s executive orders.)

This time it’s Mississippi. 

Ironically, it comes on the heels of Southern Mississippi students chanting “Where’s your green card?” at a Puerto Rican player from Kansas State during the teams’ NCAA basketball tournament game.

Anyone want to take bets on how soon the disastrous effects of these laws manifest in Mississippi?  We know from similar laws in Alabama and Georgia that laws supporting harassment of minorities have had a calamitous effect on agriculture and education, and it’s only a matter of time before this law wreaks havoc in Mississippi.

The biggest problem is, legal immigrants and citizens who fit the targeted profile probably don’t vote Republican in the first place, so convincing Republican lawmakers to vote against this crap is a fool’s errand at best.

…give me a valid reason why someone willing to risk their life for this country should not be allowed a green card in return. 

If a person enters military service to this country, they are not an illegal. (As if someone existing could be ‘illegal’ in the first place.) They are someone who’s using a valid path to citizenship, and risking life and limb to do so in service of the country and to you and I, as American citizens.

What’s more American than that?

On a whim, I decided to interrupt my football game and take a look at the KC Star, and I really wish I hadn’t. I saw this atrocious gem:

At a time when Gov. Sam Brownback has vowed to reduce child poverty, the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services — a state agency the governor controls — made a policy change that eliminated food stamps for hundreds of low-income U.S. children whose parents are illegal immigrants. For more households, benefits were reduced.

This is why you so-called ‘Pro-Life’ people do not deserve to call yourselves pro-life. 

Do you really think it’s cool for Republicans to give handouts to their golf buddies and literally take food out of the mouths of kids?

I don’t care if someone’s parents jumped the border.  That is their crime.  Their children have committed no crime, and deserve the full benefits that US citizen should receive, including food stamps.  Their parents’ crimes do not give the state a license to starve them into relocating. What’s even worse is Brownback didn’t stop there, though, he’s unilaterally reducing benefits for all low-income households.

The moral of the story is… if they call themselves ‘pro-life’, Christian, and ‘fiscal conservative’ in Kansas, they are fucking lying to you.

I got a bit of a chiding for my pessimism from some folks for my New Years Eve post, but bills like this are the reason why I can’t be optimistic for 2012. For better or worse, Republicans have made it their mission to refight all of the major battles of the last century and have also made it a political requirement for high office to demonstrate how much they hate brown people, women, queer people, and atheists.

So here we are. my own state is considering a bill that would allow wholesale harassment of non-white people.

I’m going to spend part of my day today writing my state representative and state senator, which is really a waste of time because both are Republican shills who will hop on this bandwagon to appeal to their base. I know this because both thought it was their prerogative to waste my time and tax money on a birther bill last year.

What will go completely ignored in all of this (by Republicans) is just how destructive these harassment bills are, both culturally, economically, and politically. Georgia lawmakers caused a severe labor shortage and severe economic harm to its farm industry when they enacted their own immigrant harassment bill. In Alabama, schools were alarmed at the drop in attendance following the passage of their immigrant harassment law. Then there’s the whole problem of people being tortured and held illegally in Arizona, and the recent public cases of people being deported when they are, in fact, citizens.

I hope Missouri does the right thing and torches this moronic bill.

So, let me get this straight. We torture prisoners of war, our former defense secretary is stripped of legal immunity for having covered up violence and rape of prisoners of war, and we indefinitely detain and torture elderly people, the mentally ill, and teenagers in our Guantanamo Bay facility… and I’m supposed to be reassured that we’re not torturing people who try to jump the border simply because these agents are told not to torture people?

Yeah, that makes sense.


Per CNN:

Back in 2006, volunteers with No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization dedicated to helping migrants along the Arizona-Mexico border, began hearing the same stories from many who had been in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Thwarted would-be unauthorized immigrants spoke of being denied water or food during their custody. Others said they were beaten.

The organization started properly documenting these allegations, and the stories added up to nearly 13,000 testimonies whose results were released in a report this week.

The findings went beyond denial of food and water. Migrants held by the Border Patrol spoke of being exposed to extreme heat or cold, sleep deprivation, death threats, and psychological abuse such as blaring music with lyrics about migrants dying in the desert.

A previous report by No More Deaths in 2008 raised the same concerns, but now the number of recorded cases point to a systematic problem.

“By this point, the overwhelming weight of the corroborated evidence should eliminate any doubt that Border Patrol abuse is widespread,” the report states.