Trump claimed extraordinary power under the National Emergencies Act (NEA) of 1976 to redirect money Congress had appropriated for other uses to build a wall along the border with Mexico. Trump is using the law, whose constitutionality is uncertain, to fulfill a campaign promise that he would build the wall (despite his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall) — and also to distract from the progress of Robert Mueller’s probe of his business and political ties with Russian oligarchs. The White House plans to divert $3.6 billion from military construction projects to the wall, as well as $2.5 billion from counternarcotics programs and $600 million from a Treasury Department asset forfeiture fund.
Combined with $1.375 billion authorized for fencing in the spending package Congress passed, Trump would have about $8 billion for barriers, significantly more than the $5.7 billion he had demanded from Congress.
When Trump announced the national emergency, he may have undercut his argument that the border situation was urgent. “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “I just want to get it done faster, that’s all.”
A bipartisan group of 58 former senior national security officials issued a statement Feb. 25 saying that “there is no factual basis” for Trump’s proclamation of a national emergency to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
If anything, border crossings have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years, with 467,000 apprensions in 2018, compared with one million as recently as 2006. Border cities in the US boast relatively low crime rates. Nothing going on there requires the use of armed forces — and the use of the US Army to enforce domestic immigration laws may be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of military as a domestic police force.
The NEA provides that Congress can terminate a “national emergency” by passing a joint resolution. The Democratic House has started that process, and they might get the four Republican senators they need to pass the resolution in the Senate, but they probably would need to override the president’s veto with two-thirds majorities, which would require a substantial number of Republicans to stand up to the would-be dictator.
In case Republicans won’t stand up for the constitutional separation of powers, 16 states, led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, have sued in federal court to block Trump from stealing federal funds appropriated for their states for other uses.
Trump has cited concerns that the US was being flooded with murderers, drug runners, kidnappers and other offenders from Central America. During his Rose Garden announcement of the emergency declaration, he claimed there was an ongoing “invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people,” including gang members he called “monsters” and migrants who have killed US citizens.
But according to new US Immigration and Customs Enforcement figures obtained by the Washington Post, the nation’s immigration jails were not filled with such criminals. As of Feb. 9, days before the president’s declaration, nearly 63% of the detainees in ICE jails had not been convicted of any crime.
Of the 48,793 immigrants jailed on Feb. 9, ICE data shows, 18,124 had criminal records. An additional 5,715 people had pending criminal charges, officials said, but they did not provide details. ICE also did not break down the severity of the crimes committed by or attributed to detainees.
An average of 59% of detainees in custody during this fiscal year had no criminal history, according to ICE.
Of course, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security does not have a much better record on telling the truth than Trump’s White House. DHS officials still are unable to say how many children were abducted from their parents at the border since the Trump administration took over, or what happened to hundreds of them.
The Office of Inspector General of the US Department of Health and Human Services reported in January that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement received at least 2,737 separated children before a June 2018 federal court order required ORR to identify and reunify separated children in its care as of that date, but thousands more children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court. The Trump administration not only failed to track separated families in a single database, but the agencies say they lack the resources to find out what happened to all the separated children. Some of them may have been put up for adoption without their parents’ consent.
Salvadoran officials in August 2018 said three minors from El Salvador separated from their parents after crossing the US border were sexually abused in “shelters” in Arizona, the Associated Press reported. In late July, the news website ProPublica reported that police had received at least 125 reports since 2014 of sex offenses at shelters that mostly house migrant children.
One of the most damaging impacts of the Trump presidency is the normalizing of lying. Republicans have been inoculating their supporters against believing what they call the “liberal media” for more than 40 years, ever since they blamed the mainstream news media for supporting the movement to oust President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. But the Republican disinformation campaign has been supercharged under Trump, who has taken the use of lying to a level undreamed of in generations past — at least in the United States.
The Washington Post has a team of three fact checkers assigned to examine political statements on a bipartisan basis, but the bulk of their effort has been trying to hold Trump to account for false or misleading claims, which as of Feb. 17 numbered 8,718 in the 25 months since he was inaugurated.
The Post did not have a similar team tracking President Barack Obama’s misstatements, but the New York Times reported in December 2017 that Obama made 18 demonstrably false claims during his eight years in office, while Trump told 103 separate lies or falsehoods in his first 10 months as president. (The Post counted 1,876 false or misleading claims in the same period, but it counted each time Trump repeated a lie as a separate occurrence.) A key difference is that when Obama became aware that what he was saying was untrue, he stopped saying it.
“Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, FBI or CIA officials, journalists or members of Congress,” David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson wrote in the New York Times Dec. 14, 2017. “Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.”
Trump is not only doing damage to domestic politics. America’s historic allies have come to know they cannot trust him, as he has berated and lied about NATO allies, particularly Canada, while cozying up to dictators, particularly Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Republican congressional leaders don’t appear to have a problem with Trump’s strategy. Call your senators and your member of Congress via the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and urge them to uphold the constitutional separation of powers, with a veto override, if necessary. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2019
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