The staggering number
Jeezus. More than 100 thousand visas have been revoked under Trump’s loathsome ban.
At least 100,000 visas have been revoked in a single week in response to President Trump’s executive immigration order, a lawyer for the Justice Department revealed in court Friday.
The number came to light in a Virginia courtroom as a federal judge granted the state’s motion to join a lawsuit challenging the immigration ban that caused chaos at airports over the weekend.
“The number 100,000 really sucked the air out of my lungs,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center, who represents two brothers from Yemen who were detained after arriving at Dulles Airport on Saturday and filed the original lawsuit that Virginia just joined.
Attorney Erez Reuveni, from the DOJ’s Office of Immigration Litigation, announced the staggering number after Judge Leonie Brinkema pressed for the number of people who were detained and sent back from airports.
Fortress America. White people welcome to visit; brown people…welllllll we’re going to need to ask you a lot of questions first.
The State Department quickly disputed the Justice Department’s numbers, issuing a statement claiming the amount of revoked visas was far lower.
“Fewer than 60,000 individuals’ visas were provisionally revoked to comply with the Executive Order,” said William Cocks of the State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs in an email to NBC News. “We recognize that those individuals are temporarily inconvenienced while we conduct our review under the Executive Order. To put that number in context, we issued over 11 million immigrant and non-immigrant visas in fiscal year 2015. As always, national security is our top priority when issuing visas.”
In light of the President’s order — which banned Syrian refugees indefinitely, all other refugees for 120 days, and residents of seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days — multiple court orders have been issued that rolled back some of the ban’s heavier restrictions.
Are the camps being built as we speak?
Maybe, but not by FEMA
Aren’t you glad there are no white terrorists out there? No Christians ready to bomb the people they don’t like, particularly if they work in or visit abortion clinics? No white criminals?
Oh, I feel so much safer…
s/
Yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wrote
So there is that.
Iknklast; but the white terrorists are American. Trump can’t have the jobs of those decent, hardworking, white terrorists taken by brown,illegal, foreign Muslim terrorists. And he’ll fight to keep those white, Christian terrorists’ jobs in America, where they belong…
I’m sure there’s a cabinet post for a Bundy somewhere…
Bundy is probably in line for Secretary of Federal land giveaways.
Dave @ 3 – funny how they’re all doing it privately, isn’t it. Or not so much funny as revolting.
Oh, no no no… Wasn’t Trump assuring us just days ago the number of people affected was what, in the hundreds?
Of course, he’s also so full of shit it’s a wonder he doesn’t collapse into some kinda shit singularity.
I’ve been mulling how civilization needs to respond to big lie tactics of this nature. Ain’t the first time it’s been a problem, unlikely to be the last. No sarcasm: when you get to a certain scale of lying, I wonder if our normal social adaptations are even equipped to handle it. Mulled previously on the flooding tactics used in the wired world, misinformation pouring in the way it can be aggregated to do, sowing confusion, cynicism, apathy… Seems to me there may be a related problem, here. The amount of time wasted on it, the way a continual liar with a large enough platform can just soak up energy hunting it down, cutting it apart…
Got nothin’ much yet, honestly. Does seem to me one thing might be just building the linear record, playing it back continually. Don’t give him space to say anything new until we’ve reviewed the six day long playlist of the crap he’s already put out there and not retracted. Every article on Trump: no new quotes until we’ve reviewed the last X years’ worth of lies. Work through all the crap, then at the bottom, here’s the new stupid shit. He wants to retract the old stuff, say, right, I was a lying scak of shit there you can take that one down, I take it back, we can start trimming. Until then, it just aggregates.
AJ Milne
It would be great if he stopped being treated as a normal president. If world leaders he talked to started releasing transcripts or recordings of his phone calls to them, just to reiterate how unprepared, off-base and unhinged he is. It would be great if the Queen had some comment or gesture to show her displeasure at having to host this dangerous, bullying buffoon. It would be great if more Republicans actually spoke out against his enactments, and started to actually defend the constitution.
Looks like the Toronto Star is going to keep score of Trump’s lies.
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/02/03/daniel-dales-donald-trump-fact-check-updates.html
If they were to add his cronies, minions and enablers, that would be a full time job for a large staff of reporters.
Good to see. I freelanced a bit for the Star, (mumble) decades ago, in another lifetime and world. Some of ’em were really good people.
… the Trump noise machine will of course by doing their best to discredit the press, speaking of, especially with some of them actually still trying to do their jobs, after all these years, improbably enough; it’s been the right wing strategy for decades, stepped up now, I think, naturally enough…
And note also how once ‘fake news’ started to make a dent in the public consciousness, following the sheer volume of it involved especially in the election, Trump and his acolytes quickly started trumpeting ‘fake news’ in response to every story that pointed where they didn’t want it. Quick attempt to take over the idea and distort this reality too, when the reality was: the bulk of the truly irresponsible, fictional or highly fictionalized stuff is either explicitly in their favour or largely distractionary nonsense, which, again, probably winds up working in their favour, just through creating a sort of cynical solipsism generally.
The (Alanis) irony: yes, there are major problems with the ‘media’, if you see it as a monolithic block, a single ‘thing’. But look even a little closer and the reality is: the problem with most established, professional media is largely one of emphasis (and yes, Chomsky and Herman are still relevant, here, I think), and a certain vulnerability to sensationalism, and the same vulnerability _everyone_ has to spin: yes, they’ll talk ad nauseum about an email server and pasta recipes notwithstanding there’s evidence circulating of actual deliberate collusion with an autocratic foreign power and legitimate questions on the table about the globalization of capital, and dutifully report even slightly absurd takes on what’s really going on if the person delivering the same has a title… But generally what’s speculative is at least described as such, and the probably more important stuff _is_ actually in there, somewhere, if you read past the front page and not just the scandal rags.. The blatant liars, the pizzagate is real and the UFOs are coming people, they tend not to be in those newsrooms, and the increasingly National Inquirer-esqe celebrity noise stuff mostly fills ugly little right wing tabloids who consider lottery numbers front page news…
But Trump and his axis have no interest in people appreciating this hardly-merely-a-nuance; they’ll do as well convincing everyone it’s all a basket of lies and one big ugly mess, so might as well pick the ones you like. It reminds me, yet again, of apologists for religion essentially saying the same thing: since we can’t know anything with absolute certainty, believe in my absurdities, might as well. That there are gradations in confidence and quality of evidence a complexity they’ve no interest in your thinking about.
The bright side? I think there are wavering signs of an actual pulse, here and there, in modern professional media, subscriptions rising, people working out, to some degree, how to monetize better reporting. A lot of relatively solid publications reported increases in subscriptions over the election, especially, people apparently beginning to appreciate the free viral garbage they were getting deluged with in their FaceBook feed was effectively informational junk food, if not actually toxic. _Where_ it goes from here, in terms of how people _get_ good information on their government and their economy and what’s happening where, I’m far from being able to predict real well, mind, but I’m far from throwing my hands up and declaring empiricism itself a thing we might as well give up on, anyway.
(This said, also bear in mind, by someone not at _all_ in professional media anymore, and who hasn’t been for decades; just a regular reader like probably most of the rest of you here, now.)
I think the whole ‘fake news’ meme was falling on receptive ears. The press, after all, is a bunch of college graduates, making them ‘coastal elites’. The so-called common man already distrusted them quite a bit (though often expressing trust for their small town paper). It was just one step more to what I am seeing now – students who answered nearly every question on my Critical Thinking exam with some form of ‘fake news’ and the idea that all experts are filthy liars. I’ve been seeing that last one for years. People have been primed not to trust the press. What better way for crooked politicians to flourish than by pulling the teeth of the watchdogs?