Episode Details

Show Notes and Links

We recorded the day Trump signed an executive order against breaking up families, so we really didn't have time to process the ramifications. Let me make it clear, we are 100% against the punitive separation of children from their families. We are also 100% for the comprehensive immigration reform and greater work visas for immigrant labor. (Gomer is for the legalization of literally all drugs, so that will strip the cartels of most of their power, but we don't talk about that!)

What we are not for is the hype wagon of the left wing media and anti-Trumpkins out there. Nor are we interested in the Sessions-style biblical apologetics of the Trumpkin defenders. We are pro-life, pro-family, and pro-child. Some of these parents are sketchy. Some of these kids are being trafficked (a lot more than you think) and need to be saved. Some are criminals, some are forced into criminal behavior.

GOMER'S IGNORANCE
Gomer here: "I will claim more ignorance of the elevation of abuse under Trump's administration, really especially since the month of March. I do think it's due to the increase in illegal border crossings that usually drops off the closer we get to summer. I've spent all day today reading Vox and some others about the background to the anti-Trump recent outrage and have learned a lot. I also think the Colberts of the world are just so blind with Trump hatred (again, personally, I did not vote for him and never will) they will blame everything on him and not on a lack of space, of funds, or of personnel to help these kids.

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Links:

• The Catholic vision of just immigration reform — “You drew me forth from the womb,” the Psalmist wrote to the Lord, “made me safe at my mother’s breasts.” We don’t know what happened after that Honduran girl was taken from her mother’s arms. We don’t know if she was taken to a warehouse, to be housed with hundreds of other children who had been separated from their immigrant parents. We don’t know if she sat strapped in a car seat, squalling for her mother, near the big kids who let themselves cry only as they fall asleep on gym mats spread across the floor, behind a chain link fence. We do know that policies that indiscriminately separate children from their migrant parents at our national border violate the sacred sovereignty of families. They need to be stopped. But it’s not enough to condemn the treatment of a mother separated from her child without asking what should happen instead. There have been, unfortunately, too few solutions proposed to address a real problem: how should the identity of family members be verified at the border, to ensure that children are not being trafficked? That issue needs more than moralizing or grandstanding. It needs a real solution.
• Zero-tolerance immigration policy leads to surge in family separations, lawyer says - CNN — Children generally are separated from parents who are awaiting prosecution for crossing illegally, so prosecuting more parents will result in the separation of far more children from their parents at the border than before the policy took effect. Those children become the charges of the Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families (specifically, the Office of Refugee Resettlement).

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