“The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters,” the New York Times reports.
“The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.”
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“The Senate on Tuesday passed a short-term spending bill that would keep the government running through Dec. 7, aiming to put off a fight over funding for President Trump’s border wall until after the midterm elections,” the Washington Post reports.
“GOP leaders designed the package to combine key Republican and Democratic priorities in an attempt to garner overwhelming bipartisan support — and give Trump a win on military spending, even as Congress delays a fight over the money he wants for his wall.”
“The legislation still must pass the House, which is expected to take it up next week. But it remains uncertain whether Trump will sign it. The president has toyed repeatedly with shutting down the government to try to get more money for the border wall.”
Stan Collender: No, it’s not oversight hearings into…well…anything. And it’s certainly not a subpoena, legislation to protect the Mueller investigation or the rejection of his Supreme Court nominee.”
“But the GOP congressional leadership’s decision last week not to give Donald Trump the $5 billion he wants for a wall between the United States and Mexico before the election and then to make it much harder for him to veto the legislation that codifies that decision was the closest House and Senate Republicans have come since Trump was elected to publicly giving him their collective middle finger.”
President Trump accused congressional Republicans of being played “like a fiddle” by Democrats on border security
Said Trump: “When will Republican leadership learn that they are being played like a fiddle by the Democrats on Border Security and Building the Wall? Without Borders, we don’t have a country. With Open Borders, which the Democrats want, we have nothing but crime! Finish the Wall!”
“The foreign-born population in the United States has reached its highest share since 1910, according to government data released Thursday, and the new arrivals are more likely to come from Asia and to have college degrees than those who arrived in past decades,” the New York Times reports.
“The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States. For years newcomers tended to be from Latin America, but a Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41% of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39% were from Latin America. About 45% were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30% of those who came between 2000 and 2009.”
The Trump administration took nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s budget this summer to help boost U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to budget documents shared with USA Today.
Oregon state Rep. Mike Nearman (R) is the vice president of an anti-immigrant hate group with ties to eugenicist John Tanton, who has pushed white nationalist politics through a series of anti-immigrant organizations, the group told the Daily Beast.
Nearman denied having a leadership role when Oregon alt-weekly Corvallis Advocate revealed his ties to the group last week.
The childhood rabbi to Stephen Miller, special adviser to Donald Trump and a key architect of his “zero-tolerance” immigration policies, criticized his former charge as a purveyor of “negativity, violence, malice and brutality” who had learned nothing from his Jewish spiritual education, The Guardian reports.
“The Trump administration has consistently sought to exaggerate the potential security threat posed by refugees and dismissed an intelligence assessment last year that showed refugees did not present a significant threat to the U.S.,” three former senior officials told NBC News.
“Hardliners in the administration then issued their own report this year that several former officials and rights groups say misstates the evidence and inflates the threat posed by people born outside the U.S.”
Rob Tibbetts, the father of Mollie Tibbetts, the Iowa college student who was allegedly murdered by someone in the U.S. illegally, implored anti-immigration activists to stop using his daughter’s death for political purposes in a Des Moines Register op-ed:
At the outset, politicians and pundits used Mollie’s death to promote various political agendas. We appealed to them and they graciously stopped. For that, we are grateful.
Sadly, others have ignored our request. They have instead chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed. I encourage the debate on immigration; there is great merit in its reasonable outcome. But do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist…
Please leave us out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.
“When Congress returns from recess after Labor Day weekend, lawmakers will have just 11 legislative days before an Oct. 1 deadline to pass new spending legislation or a stopgap funding bill to keep the government open, or risk the third government shutdown in 2018,” CNBC reports.
“But the White House is considering at least one alternative option, according to three people who have discussed the idea with West Wing officials: A ‘partial shutdown,’ in which President Trump would sign stand-alone bills to fund the majority of the government, while reserving the right to veto others if they don’t include funding for the border wall.”
“The strategy, said to be supported internally by senior policy advisor Stephen Miller and, to a lesser extent, budget director Mick Mulvaney, would eliminate traditional shutdown vignettes of withheld paychecks and closed national parks and veterans affairs facilities. It would allow the White House to exact leverage over a specific campaign issue before a potential party reorg in Congress — and prevent a forced signature on a wide-ranging and opaque spending bill that excludes his top priority.”
“The FBI has dramatically slowed the pace of security reviews for refugees in recent months, which former Trump administration officials and human rights advocates say is part of an intentional bid by White House hardliners to restrict the number of refugees allowed in the U.S.,” NBC News reports.
“Former officials and aid organizations say the administration has overloaded the FBI and other government agencies with an array of procedures that have weighed down the bureaucracy and effectively delayed refugee admissions.”
“The Trump administration has still not reunited over 500 migrant children with their parents after separating families at the border in recent months,” the HuffPost reports.
“In a status report, the government’s lawyers said that 528 children remained in government-contracted shelters without their parents as of Aug. 20 ― nearly a month after the court-ordered July 26 deadline to reunify separated families.”
Stephen Glosser, uncle of White House aide Stephen Miller, writes in Politico:
“I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, who is an educated man and well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.“
“If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.”
Los Angeles Times: “A man recently sworn in as a United States citizen had failed to disclose on his naturalization application that he had been arrested, but not convicted, in California on rape and theft charges. Shusterman, then a naturalization attorney, embarked on a months-long effort to do something that rarely happened: strip someone of their American citizenship.”
Said Shusterman: “We had to look it up to find out how to do this. We’d never even heard of it.”
“Forty years later, denaturalization — a complex process once primarily reserved for Nazi war criminals and human rights violators — is on the rise under the Trump administration. A United States Citizenship and Immigration Services team in Los Angeles has been reviewing more than 2,500 naturalization files for possible denaturalization, focusing on identity fraud and willful misrepresentation. More than 100 cases have been referred to the Department of Justice for possible action.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Wonk Wire, Political Job Hunt and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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