My son, who should know better but who is unfortunately surrounded by Trump Deranged hysterics all day long, told me today that he is terrified that he will be deported. He was adopted from Russia, and naturalized when he was less than a year old. Then he got updated citizenship documents when he was 18. He was convicted of a felony, reckless driving and eluding when he was still in his teens, and there is no chance, none, zero, that he will or could be deported. Nevertheless, he refuses to believe me.
I blame a lot of despicable people for this, including President Trump, who thinks trolling the hysterics is funny. It’s not. My son says he can’t sleep, and he already suffers from intermittent anxiety and depression. The main culprits, of course, are the same people and institutions who claimed that Trump is Hitler reincarnated, that he colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, that he’s a Bond super-villain who wanted the Presidency so he can achieve world domination. Trump, being an incurable jerk, deliberately feeds their false narratives and paranoia by saying things like, “I may serve a third term” and riffing about invading Greenland.
The worst culprits may be, as usual, the news media. Consider this report on NBC, headlined, “‘Obviously illegal’: Experts pan Trump’s plan to deport ‘homegrown criminals’” Well, that’s a lie right up front: Trump said nothing about any plan: there isn’t a “plan.” Then the story undercuts its own headline, saying, “Trump has suggested that “homegrown” criminals who have been convicted of certain crimes should be deported, but the idea raises significant legal questions.” Ideas don’t raise any legal questions, they are just ideas. I think child sexual abusers should be castrated and forced to eat their genitals with chocolate sauce, but I’m not seriously proposing it. This is the Big Lie technique again: Trump says something on a whim, the news media and the Deranged treat it as a serious proposal, and then gullible people (like my son, unfortunately), lose their minds.
Reporter Lawrence Hurley, a hack, begins his story, “If an immigrant who the government claims is a gang member can be deported to El Salvador without any due process rights, then why not a U.S. citizen?” Another deliberate lie. This poor, innocent deportee has been adjudicated to be an illegal immigrant, so he should be deported. He went through several processes on the way to that determination, but nonetheless managed to stay here for 11 long years. I don’t care if he’s a gang member or not. He wasn’t deprived of “any” due process rights, but never mind that: nothing in his saga suggests that American citizens can or will be deported, and even then, the President referenced violent crimes as the criteria for his fantasy deportation policy.
Again, this asshole reporter uses the plan canard: “President Donald Trump again pushed a provocative plan to deport U.S. citizens who have been convicted of unspecified crimes.” Wow, now it’s a provocative “plan” that isn’t a plan at all. Nor is it honest to say he mentioned “unspecified” crimes. “We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters. “I’d like to include them.” Yeah, and I’d like to drive a Sherman tank. That doesn’t mean I have a plan to do it.
The crimes Trump specified are deadly assaults on little old ladies with baseball bats and people who push strangers onto subway tracks to get squished. You know, “monsters.” Sure, it would be swell to rid the country of monsters, but if they are citizens, we’re stuck with them.
Then Trump said that Attorney General Pam Bondi is “studying the law.” Gee, she’s the Attorney General—hasn’t she studied the law already? Anyway, Blondie Bondi can study until the proverbial cows come home: the government can’t deport citizens, and certainly not citizens who were arrested for speeding when they were teenagers. Then the NBC story rattled off legal “experts” who pronounced the non-existent “plan” as unconstitutional, which any high school senior should know, if our public schools were any good, which they aren’t.
It doesn’t help that the dumbest of our SCOTUS justices, “wise Latina” Sotomajor, wrote in the Garcia opinion, “The implication of the government’s position is that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. As usual, she’s a disgrace: good one, Barack! The distinguishing feature of the deported alien is that he was here illegally. His return to his home country has no nexus to an American citizen being deported at all. But the idea is to make Donald Trump scary because of his “plan.”
The reporter dishonestly tries to justify Sonia’s irresponsible idiocy by writing, “The parallel legal dispute over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who the Justice Department has admitted was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, also has bearing on any proposal to deport U.S. citizens.” No, it does not because he was and is an illegal immigrant, not an “immigrant.” Then the hack writes, doubling down on the lie, “If that logic is applied to U.S. citizens, they could potentially be summarily deported without being able to challenge it. Although Trump has said he would only want to target criminals, there is also no reason the government could treat others who have not been convicted of crimes in the same way.”
What logic? Illegal immigrants aren’t immigrants, and un-naturalized legal immigrants aren’t citizens, who by all legal standards get to stay in the U.S. no matter what they do.
Fake news, fake crisis, fake hysteria, all to make vulnerable people irrational. How disgusting.
Ethics Alarms 
Whoa! I was born in Ohio but live in Texas. Should be worried Greg Abbott will deport me to Ashtabula?
jvb
I interpreted the “homegrown” characterization to be more in line with people who were admitted lawfully but then became radicalized or later became involved in criminal activity while here.
I suppose one could interpret “homegrown” as born here or citizen but a “homegrown terrorist or criminal” does not necessarily mean citizen it simply means the activity that precipitated the deportation began here.
USA Today is pushing the narrative that Trump plans to invoke martial law on April 20 so what definition of “homegrown” does anyone expect the media to use.
As one whom you certainly label with TDS, I can’t blame your son. With all that is happening, Trump’s deliberately inflammatory statements must be viewed not as his usual stream of consciousness but as his internal wish list, at least. You must admit that that kind of speech is highly unpresidential and unforgivably unethical. He KNOWS that he is fomenting anxiety and fear. That’s the point. Inflammatory reporting? Who was unethical first?
Well I said that, and have said it before, but fake or joke wish lists are not genuine threats, and I expect mature, intelligent people to know the difference. Life competence. Every day ethics.
If that’s the case, why should ANYONE treat this person as anything but insane and dangerous? Everything that comes out of his mouth should be considered as NOT off the table. How can we think otherwise? I know the difference between bloviating and threats. As I said, it doesn’t seem like anything is off the table.
How can we think otherwise? Because we can think, and we learn what people are like, we interpret what they say in that context. Deliberately making the same mistake and freaking out over what we should know is nonsense is what I refer to as derangement.
I have recently been introduced to Patrick Lencioni’s model in which he describe six types of working “geniuses”, or more accurately, six behavior types that people can have when approaching work. For any person, there will be two geniuses that they display, and two geniuses that are their antitheses. The six categories are wonder, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enablement, and tenacity. At the high level you have people who generate ideas and people who ask “why are things this way” questions. In the middle are the people who either play gatekeeper on the ideas from the high level, or organize and rally people (at the low level). On the low level, you have the people who excel at clearing obstacles from work, and those who excel at driving through the last 10% of a project, making sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.
The successful businessmen typically have wonder and invention. I would guess that Trump falls into this category. He’ll wonder at why things are the way they are, and he’ll come up with all kinds of ideas. Those ideas won’t always be workable ones. Such a person needs people around him who evaluate his ideas and either approve or reject them. And then he needs people who will actually work to drive his good ideas to completion.
This is how I approach Trump. When he speaks, I don’t pay close attention to what exactly he says when he’s speaking off the cuff. I listen to the core of what he is after. I take him seriously, but not literally. When he makes all kinds of statements, some of which raise eyebrows even among his staunchest supporters, I believe he is throwing out ideas in the expectation that people will challenge him on them, and when they have been considered, if they are bad, he’ll throw them out and move on. But even in these cases, he’s expressing a concern over a legitimate problem, and it is that problem that is on his mind, and he’ll keep proposing solutions until something workable arrives.
I do think there is a danger if Trump does not have sufficient personnel around him that he 1) trusts and 2) are willing to push back on his ideas when they are not workable. Still, when looking back on his first term, I saw someone who endured unprecedented assaults and betrayals and who emerged with a decent track record despite all that. So the bar for not having sufficient numbers of good people around him is pretty low.
So, having shared how I approach Trump, can you expand on why you believe everything Trump says cannot simply be attributed to stream of consciousness? What in particular makes his statement that “He would deport homegrown terrorist” as an actual mission statement, rather than expression of his desire to combat homegrown terrorism?
“I take him seriously, but not literally.“
Yes. I have heard this said of Trump supporters (or at least the non-deranged.). They don’t take him literally, but they do take him seriously.
Thanks for the introduction to Lencioni. My boss would be in the Trump camp of “genius”. In fact, she once described the way her brain works as a stone skipping across a pond. She moves from one idea to the next with no thought as to how to make those ideas come to fruition, or whether or not they are good, or profitable. That’s what we, her team, are for. We either make her ideas happen or we come back and say “not gonna work.” It makes for a pretty great symbiosis.
The news media, in this case, is just plain lying to America. They aren’t even trying to hide it. I have read over and over again people claiming loudly that what America is doing to illegal immigrants implies they will do the same to legal immigrants. It’s blatant scare-mongering. My wife is a naturalized US citizen just like your son, and she has absolutely no fear of deportation. Nor should she.
If you are naturalized and did not commit fraud on your application for naturalization, you generally cannot be denaturalized. There are a few instances, such as joining a “totalitarian” political party within five years of naturalization that can also result in denaturalization proceedings. It is also true that the Trump administration (as the Obama administration did in 2010) is aggressively reviewing naturalizations for defects and, where fraud is found, initiating denaturalization proceedings.
Which basically boils down to this — if you did not lie or deliberately omit stuff on your naturalization application that would’ve affected the naturalization decision and refrained from being a notorious Stalinist for five years thereafter, you are almost certainly safe from denaturalization proceedings.
Just as Instapundit styles it, no matter how much you hate the mainstream media, it is not enough.
Finally, this absurdity about Abrego Garcia is just performative scare-mongering. Abrego Garcia was never, ever a U.S. citizen, naturalized or otherwise, and has at all times been a legal citizen of El Salvador. He has been afforded more due process than most felons in the U.S., has been legally adjudicated a member of the MS-13 gang, has been lawfully adjudicated deportable and has a legal deportation order against him. He isn’t and never at any point been a legal citizen of Maryland or any other state.
The only issue is that the courts had forbidden his return to El Salvador due to a potential threat on his life from a rival gang in his neighborhood, a problem which almost certainly no longer exists because that rival gang has been virtually eliminated by El Salvador. Still, there is no doubt he was illegally deported to that country because of the order forbidding it.
But make no mistake, no matter what any judge rules, he cannot lawfully be returned to the United States. He violated US immigration law and unlawfully resided here for more than one year, which means absent a parole from the Executive or a change in the law by normal processes, he cannot be allowed by law into the United States for at least ten years.
So much garbage. You really can’t hate them enough.
Thank you Glenn for the facts.
I appreciate the fundamental root that illegal immigrants, by definition, are criminals. Automatically.
Too many people fall back on “we should avoid deporting the ones that haven’t committed crime in favor of deporting the ones who are criminals”.
I agree with the sentiment “the worst first”, but, by the very definition, even the “least worst” are still criminals. While there may be room for debate on whether or not at some point, after a lot of clearing out deportations, that illegal immigrants who have been here for decades and have never committed crimes other than the illegal entry and have otherwise been productive might receive some sort of amnesty – that amnesty still requires the forgiveness of a *crime*.
My understanding is that the administration can issue paroles on an individualized basis — not the same as amnesty, but I think more apropos to a person who has come here illegally.
Biden issued at least one mass parole for two years, which Trump is trying to undo. Even though this was done by executive fiat, the Leftist judges seem to think it cannot be undone by a future president. Go figure.
One thing that will be coming out of all of this are bad precedents which will take take to undo, if they ever are.
test
Regarding ideas and what to do with them…
A psychiatrist named Nassir Ghaemi wrote a book called _A first rate madness_ (2011) about the role of personality and mental illness in the success or failure of political leaders. It’s a readable book that consists of a series of vignettes.
The chapter on Winston Churchill notes, among other things, that Churchill had a vast number of ideas that came to him constantly. His ideas needed to be reviewed and winnowed by his staff.
As an example of a good one, Churchill had the idea of prefabricated harbors for the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, including even “blockships,” old ships that were filled with concrete and then deliberately sunk to create breakwaters.
One of Churchill’s staff is quoted like this (to paraphrase from my memory):
“A typical Winston idea…he has about 100 ideas a day, and about 4 of them are any good.”
–charles w abbott
rochester NY
Long story short, I sometimes observe discussions regarding curriculum and management at small high school in my area.
I would concur that many people (both high school students and teaching/support staff) seem to have the dim idea that the Trump administration is going to deport just about anyone, especially immigrants, anyone who might be an immigrant, visible minorities who are suspected to be immigrants, or just about anybody he doesn’t like.
In part I blame the excitable portion of the school community that fears that worst and tends to constantly magnify the threat of Trump and his administration. Often the issues are discussed in vague generalities, with emphasis on the terrible nature of Trump’s plans.
Additionally I blame the lack of civics education and the failure (perhaps deliberate) to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.
A talking point of the woke and leftist activists in the USA is that “no human is illegal.” This slogan confuses people (perhaps deliberately). To be specific, it systematically erodes the distinction between legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, visible minorities who have been naturalized, persons born in the USA (presumably with birthright citizenship) to parents here illegally, foreign nationals residing here legally (but not intending to stay), and other categories of immigration status.
Additionally, there is a failure (I think) to discuss the fact that many people crossed illegally into the USA and were given temporary legal permission to stay by administrative fiat, able to reside here until their status is adjudicated by a legal system overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who crossed the border illegally or who were flown in on ad hoc flights, etc.
Thanks for reading.
The following is a point I make periodically. Maybe not at this fabulous web site just yet.
If you read Colin McEvedy’s book _Penguin Atlas of the Ancient History_ he makes a useful distinction between citizenship in the Greek city states and in the Roman Empire.
As a generalization, in the Greek city states (I suspect he means especially pre-Alexander the Great), citizenship was hard to get and easy to lose. That was the default system in that region and under that cultural system. Hard to become a citizen. Easy to lose that status. It was valuable, and and it was not given out freely to all comers.
Under the Roman system (after what point I’m not certain) it was the opposite. Citizenship was easy to get and hard to lose.
We are obviously closer to Rome. Much of the Western Hemisphere trends in that direction, I suspect.