6/17/2025

 Tuesday, June 17, 2025

D++202/135/1313

Sick Day #4  (on the mend)

q2w

w3e

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In bed by 9, up at 5:40 with intestinal woes. 67°, high of 83°, sunny    

Kevzara, day 7/14; Trulicity, day 5/7; morning meds at 9 a.m.; Blink pill at 9 a.m.; Eye wipes at 8 a.m. and   p.m.; Eye mask at  a.m. and p.m.;  Eye ointment at bedtime.  Nyquil and Eye Ointment at bedtime.

How often have we heard Trump call immigrants "animals"?

Different in kind.  Perhaps the main characteristic that distinguishes Donald Trump from his Republican predecessors, indeed all his predecessors, is cruelty, malevolence, intentionally inflicting pain and suffering on various others in order to advance his own interests or simply to punish them for some supposed wrong.  We saw it most vividly during his first term with his child separation policy for immigrants at the southern border.  According to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security, 3,881 children were separated from their families from 2017 to 2021. About 74% of those have been reunited with their families.  As of October 2023, approximately 1,000 children remain separated from their parents.  To many of us, and I hope most of us, intentionally orphaning children would be unthinkable; to Trump, it was a sign of strength.

Caitlin Dickerson tells the story of how family separation became official United States policy in the August 7, 2022, issue of The Atlantic in a very lengthy article titled "We Need to Take Away Children."  Its origin goes back to the attacks on 9/11/01, which caused a heightened sense of jeopardy from foreigners in the U.S.  At the southern border, unauthorized border crossings that had long been treated as civil offenses began to be treated as crimes, a misdemeanor for the first offense, a felony for subsequent offenses.  This policy was called Operation Streamline.  In 2018, the policy was expanded to include families crossing the border illegally or even seeking asylum.  The policy was first proposed, however, back in the summer of 2014 when Jeh Johnson was Obama's Secretary of Homeland Security.  Dickinson reports that Johnson

 convened a meeting in Washington with his top border-enforcement officials to discuss ideas. Among those present were Kevin McAleenan, who was then the deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection; Ron Vitiello, the deputy chief of the Border Patrol; and Tom Homan, the executive associate director of enforcement and removal for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. All three would subsequently be promoted, and become integral to implementing family separations four years later.

Of those in the room, Homan was the most strident. He had spent decades in immigration enforcement, beginning in his early 20s as a Border Patrol agent. Homan said he wanted to apply the perceived lessons of Operation Streamline to migrant families, by prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Though many of these families came to the U.S. seeking asylum, under this new model they would be treated as criminals. Homan explained that the parents would be taken into federal criminal custody, just like with Operation Streamline—only this time the process would trigger an automatic family separation.

This is the earliest instance I’ve discovered of family separation being proposed as a way to deter migration to the United States. This makes Tom Homan the father of what might be the Trump administration’s most controversial policy.

USAID- PREDICTED DEATHS. . . .  DOGE, UNEMPOYMENT  MEDICAID

I'm not up to completing these thoughts.  Still under the weather.