Democrats must shame Republicans into ending the separation of migrants and their children at the border, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal says.
“We should be very blunt: The biggest tool we have is shame,” the Senator said at a press conference on Capitol Hill.
We need to shame this administration into changing an inhumane, un-American policy because it is totally unprecedented … It is not required by law, it is unprecedented in recent history — it was not done under the previous administration — [and] it is creating thousands of detainees.
Blumenthal and other Democratic legislators at the press event cited their own children, and the impending Fathers’ Day celebrations, to guilt GOP leaders and blue-collar voters to reopen the migration into the voters’ neighborhoods and schools.
“I’m hoping on Fathers Day that Donald Trump will think about what it means to be a dad and to care about a young child who is ripped away from his parents, who has no ideas where he is going,” Blumenthal said. “Ripping apart families, separating kids from parents … is un-American because we will reap the whirlwind of the damage we are creating,” he said.
Blumenthal is an Ivy League graduate with an estimated net worth of $85 million. He has an expensive home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Blumenthal’s statement came as he and other Democratic legislators declined to answer a question from Breitbart News about the economic impact of migrant workers on Americans’ salaries.
Blumenthal’s goal of ending the administration’s detention-and-housing policy would reopen the catch-and-release pathways which have been used by a huge number of migrants to get into Americans’ cities and workplaces. That extra supply of cheap manual-labor cuts Americans’ wages — but is an economic boon for cheap-labor employers in the Democratic-dominated cities, such as restaurants in New York and retail stores in Oakland.
Blumenthal and at least 30 Democratic Senators have backed a draft law that would reopen loopholes and free hundreds of thousands of laborers to enter the U.S. job market.
In 2017, federal officials provided two-year work permits to 400,000 of the migrants who were released into the United States under pro-migration “catch and release” policies set by President Barack Obama. Those migrants are allowed to work because their court cases have been delayed in the clogged asylum courts. The migrants arrived in 2013 and later, in a huge wave of migration that smashed Obama’s polls and helped an outsider sweep away the establishment in 2016.
President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are now trying to deter migrants by prosecuting all illegal immigrants. That policy forces officials to detain the migrants before their trials while any children that the migrants bring are housed in government-contracted centers.
The new zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting migrants and housing children trumps the migrants’ tactic of bringing children to the border to trigger a 1997 catch-and-release loophole. The Flores loophole requires officials to release migrants within 20 days if they bring children.
Under Obama, that Flores loophole was used by officials to justify releasing a huge number of economic migrants into the U.S. job market.
Once released, the migrants usually work long hours to pay the debts they owe to the cartels for crossing the cartel-controlled border.
The migrants’ children are placed in Americans schools, regardless of the impact on American children in blue-collar neighborhoods. Few migrants can afford to live in upper-income neighborhoods, ensuring that few of their underprepared children are placed in upper-income schools.
Many progressives, progressive groups, and immigration lawyers are trying to shame the administration —and ordinary Americans — into ending the detention-and-housing policy, despite the impact on those Americans’ neighborhoods and jobs.
The shaming efforts include a wide variety of tactics — media rants at officials, use of Father’s Day references, plus myriad tweets which smear administration officials and ordinary Americans as racists and even Nazis.
For example:
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