Hmmmm.
AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another. https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) January 9, 2019
The rapist’s demand for the woman to spread her legs is one reason for the rape. The woman’s refusal to comply is another.
Oh god oh god oh god he did say it
"They say a wall is medieval—well, so is a wheel," Pres. Trump says at meeting near southern border. "A wheel is older than a wall."
"There are some things that work, you know what? A wheel works, and a wall works." https://t.co/1QHVGTRFOZ pic.twitter.com/Vgs87esAmz
— ABC News (@ABC) January 10, 2019
Gail Collins addresses something I wondered about after watching a fragment of Trump’s attempted speech the other night:
Maybe all this wall obsessing makes Trump tired. He certainly seemed low-energy during his Oval Office address. “He makes Jeb Bush look like a combination of Mighty Mouse and Bruce Springsteen,” a friend of mine said after the president finished his nine-minute speech to the American people.
For every viewer whose response to the talk was “Wow, we should do something about immigration!” there must have been a hundred whose first reaction was “Why does this man keep sniffing?” Deviated septum? Nasal polyps? Trump’s breathing has actually sounded strange for a long time, but most of us have chosen to ignore it rather than engage in a national conversation about the president’s nose.
If you watched the address — and really, you could have, it was only about as long as it takes to microwave popcorn — you saw a 72-year-old guy squinting at the teleprompter and making rather alarming breathing sounds while reading a speech about how we need a wall to protect women who are “sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico.”
This is not a man who should wrap his arguments around the idea of protecting women from sexual assault. But also, gee, he sounded like Uncle Fred who you haven’t seen for a while and suddenly he shows up for Thanksgiving with weird colored hair and vacant eyes and he’s talking into his mashed potatoes.
Now we know why Trump never made a speech from the Oval Office before. He’s a guy whose great political talent is yelling applause lines to a howling mob of supporters. If they cheer, he goes back again and again.
That’s what I was wondering about – how he manages to draw those howling mobs of supporters when he is so bad at talking. I guess it’s because of the howling mobs of supporters? They inspire him? He’s not more reasonable or coherent or interesting in front of the mobs but at least he doesn’t look and sound like a store dummy hideously brought to life.
Really? REALLY?? REALLY???
Trump: "A wheel is older than a wall. And I looked, and every single car out there, even the really expensive ones that the Secret Service uses, and believe me they are expensive, I said, 'Do they all have wheels?' 'Yes.' 'Oh. I thought it was medieval.'"
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 10, 2019
Trump has gone to Texas, even though he didn’t want to, so that he can…look studly on the border? Or something?
He does look hawt, you gotta admit.
CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
President Trump arrived in this border town Thursday on a trip that he did not want to take to discuss a crisis that Democrats say does not exist.
He’s helpless. If they tell him to go to this border town in Texas, he has to go.
But as the government shutdown neared the end of its third week, the president left Washington with no additional negotiations scheduled with congressional leaders. In remarks to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Trump left open the possibility of declaring a state of emergency, which could allow him to bypass Congress to fund the wall.
Asked if he would make such a declaration, an action that would likely face legal challenges, Mr. Trump said: “If this doesn’t work out, probably I will do it. I would almost say definitely.”
If what doesn’t work out? His trip to the border in Texas? He expects that to “work out”? Meaning, to convince the Democrats to agree to spending 5 billion dollars building his racist wall? Why would it do that? How could it?
In a meeting with network anchors on Tuesday ahead of his address to the nation, the president dismissed his trip to McAllen, a border community where crime is near a 30-year low, as a “photo op” that he was doing because his top communications advisers counseled him to.
I bet they didn’t advise him to tell network anchors that though.
In Texas, a crowd of supporters with flags and “build the wall” signs gathered near the Rio Grande before Air Force One landed on Thursday. While in Texas, Mr. Trump is expected to meet with Border Patrol officials who are being forced to work without pay because of the funding impasse.
Meet with them to do what? Tell them to hold garage sales? To make adjustments? To take up dog-walking?
To bolster his campaign for the wall, the president has also scheduled an interview with the Fox host Sean Hannity, who will broadcast his show Thursday night from McAllen. Mr. Hannity is one of the president’s highest-profile supporters and is highly influential among his political base.
Ah, great, that’s definitely the person we want running the country: Sean Hannity.
Justin E. H. Smith on the higher bullshit:
Derrida means nothing without his Parisian institutional setting, but once that setting comes into focus, he continues to mean nothing, though now in a different way: he means nothing, individually, because the tricks he was encouraged to perform that so dazzled the crowds at Johns Hopkins and Irvine were taught to many others just like him, who would all of course insist on their own uniqueness, would claim they were always outsiders to the true French intellectual elite, but only because you cannot enter the tightest nucleus of this elite if you do not claim to be an outsider to it, all the while, all of them, yielding up only minor variations on the same recipes.
The logic of this performance of outsiderness is the same as in many genres of popular music, where the whole delicate game is to appear to maintain your street cred as a bad boy who disdains the major record labels and the award shows, all the while clamouring for such distinctions.
I like that because it describes so much of what passes for lefty politics right now, especially the union of ferocious policing and punishment with proud displays of awesome rad woke specialness.
Better for some, then, to go far away, where the rules of the game are not so transparent, where you’ve got no Bourdieu hounding you and exposing your every move as really nothing more than the species-specific behaviour of Homo academicus francogallicus. Like top chefs who travel far to ply their trade, Derrida found that the crowds at his distant destinations could not make any distinction between what was inspired in his words, and what was inherited, what was the product of a singular mind, and what the generic template of an earlier acculturation. The most conventional dishes will get French chefs raving reviews if they go and open a restaurant, perhaps calling it ‘Ooh-La-La’, in a strip mall in Orange County (an example drawn from my true memory of a suburban California childhood). That is the whole secret of Derrida’s decades-long mystification of the Anglophone world.
It helps a lot that Americans are so far away and so very provincial. It apparently never occurred to the smitten-by-Derrida even to ask how his colleagues saw him, let alone to suspect that he was nowhere near as groundbreaking as his Anglophone reputation made him seem.
It is, moreover, nothing short of the highest species of farce that the likes of Ronell were permitted for so long to use university offices as their deconstructionist romper rooms, to develop their tiny cults of personality and have their imagined French romances, only because administrators, unable to understand what the lit professors were talking about, assumed that it was just very difficult and profound philosophy, and saw that whatever it was all about was economically useful for the cultivation of institutional prestige.
While it lasted.
Victims of forced marriages overseas will no longer have to take out loans to pay for their return to the UK.
It emerged last week in an investigation by The Times that those unable to cover flights, food and shelter were made to take out an emergency loan.
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the policy was changing as victims “may have endured particular suffering”.
Existing loans will be written off and the women’s passports returned.
The Foreign Office is going to try to get the money back from the people who arranged the forced marriage, which seems only fair.
This one will lose him some MAGA fans, because he’s playing them for suckers.
President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that his oft-made 2016 campaign promise that he would build a wall and Mexico would pay for it didn’t mean it would be a direct payment, despite outlining just that scenario during his campaign.
Yeah, they’re not going to like that, because he said it to them and they know that and nobody likes being played for a sucker.
“When during the campaign, I would say ‘Mexico is going to pay for it,’ obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they’re gonna write out a check, I said they’re going to pay for it. They are,” he said as he prepared to depart the White House for the southern border.
We’re not that stupid, Don. We’re not your kids.
But in April 2016, Trump’s campaign outlined the steps he would take to compel Mexico to pay the US “$5-10 billion” to fund a border wall — a plan that relies largely on threatening to bar undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States from wiring money to relatives in Mexico.
“It’s an easy decision for Mexico: make a one-time payment of $5-10 billion to ensure that $24 billion continues to flow into their country year after year,” the memo said.
Don’t insult us, Don. Nobody likes being insulted that way.
Deutsche Welle reports that the Trump administration has downgraded the diplomatic status of the EU delegation to the US.
The unannounced move by the US State Department, which has not previously been reported, downgraded the EU delegation’s diplomatic status in Washington from member state to international organization.
“We don’t exactly know when they did it, because they conveniently forgot to notify us,” an EU official who is familiar with the matter told DW in an interview.
“I can confirm that this has not been well received in Brussels,” the person said, adding that the issue and an official EU response was still being discussed.
Welllll who needs Europe when we can have Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia? Europe is for what Trump calls elleetissts.
A Washington-based diplomat of an EU member state also confirmed the downgrade and denounced the move.
“This is clearly not simply a protocol issue, but this is something that has a very obvious political motive,” the person said. The diplomat added that the negative view of the EU mission downgrade was shared by the majority of member states.
After discovering the downgrade, EU diplomats in Washington reached out to the State Department, which is responsible for diplomatic affairs, for clarification. “They have told us that they forgot to notify us and that this is a decision they have taken because that is apparently what the chief of protocol thinks is the proper thing to do,” the person said.
Meaning, it’s what the Trumpies told them to do.
The diplomatic downgrade of the EU’s mission in Washington appears to be in line with what is widely being perceived as an anti-EU stance by the Trump administration.
Trump was an avid supporter of Britain’s exit from the European Union during his presidential campaign, and as president has repeatedly lashed out at the European Union on issues such as trade and defense.
Europe isn’t authoritarian enough for Trump’s tastes.
Russell Berman in the Atlantic:
Eric Young is the president of the union that represents the approximately 30,000 employees of the Federal Bureau of Prisons who are working during the government shutdown.
Young’s members, scattered at 122 facilities located in largely rural areas across the country, aren’t being paid and don’t know when their next paycheck will come. Like the leaders of virtually every federal-employee union during the past three weeks, he has condemned the shutdown and its toll on innocent workers as “unconscionable.”
“My personal opinion,” Young told me over the phone from his office in Arkansas, “is that it constitutes involuntary servitude.”
Neither Young nor any of his partners in union leadership, however, will urge their members to do the one thing that would seem most natural for employees facing the same treatment in the private sector: If they don’t pay you, stay home.
“We can’t call or advocate for a strike,” Young said.
Why? Because of the highly regressive Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which made it illegal for federal employees to go on strike. As far as I know it’s also illegal to force people to work for no pay, but heads the bosses win, tails the workers lose.
The current shutdown is a partial one affecting roughly 800,000 federal employees. Roughly half of them are on furlough, while the other half, whose jobs are considered essential to public health and safety, must report to work even though Congress has not appropriated the funds to pay them. This category includes the Secret Service agents who protect the president and his family, the Transportation Security Agents, pilots, and air-traffic controllers who keep the aviation system running, the corrections officers who staff federal prisons, and, yes, the Border Patrol agents who guard the southern divide with Mexico along which Trump wants to build a wall.
If they don’t show up, “they’d be considered absent without leave,” said Jacque Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, by far the largest union representing federal employees. “When they’re told to come to work, they are required to come to work.” An awol designation could lead to disciplinary action, including termination. For longtime government employees, that could put in jeopardy a federal pension they’ve spent a career accruing, union leaders said.
Trump doesn’t care. He said last weekend that they will “make an adjustment,” which is meaningless, but he doesn’t care. He’s not having to do without, and neither is Princess Ivanka, and that’s all he cares about.
Meanwhile this vehicle we’re trapped in is racing toward the cliff.
President Trump slammed his hand on a table and stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday after Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said she would not fund a wall along the southern border, dramatically escalating the confrontation over the government shutdown.
Stunned Democrats emerged from the White House meeting declaring that Mr. Trump had thrown a “temper tantrum.” The president’s allies accused Democrats of refusing to negotiate. Then he tweeted that the meeting was “a total waste of time.”
As opposed to rage-tweeting, and withdrawing emergency aid to victims of wildfires, and watching Fox News for 8 hours a day? Those are valuable uses of time are they?
Moderate Republicans who entered the room confident that senators were coalescing around the idea that the government should be reopened while the border security debate continues left disappointed, convinced that for now, the party would follow Mr. Trump perilously further into a shutdown with an uncertain end.
A handful of them, including Cory Gardner of Colorado, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and James Lankford of Oklahoma, pressed Mr. Trump on the mounting impact on federal workers and related industries in their states. His response was consistent.
Of course it was, because he’s a selfish stubborn piece of crap who doesn’t care how much misery and desperation he is causing as long as he gets his own way.
But, in much better news –
Incredible news for Saudi teen @rahaf84427714.
The UN says she should be granted asylum in Australia as a refugee.
This the power of a Twitter campaign and the bravery of one young woman.#SaveRahaf #رهف_محمد_القنون pic.twitter.com/2x06dFYrRe— Natasha Fatah (@NatashaFatah) January 9, 2019
https://twitter.com/rahaf84427714/status/1082961242979938304
Kudos to the Government of Australia !!! @Liam_Cochrane @australian @SkyNewsAust @westaustralian @PravitR #RahafMohamed #RahafMohammedalQunun #RahafMohammed #Rahaf #Saudi #SaudiWomen @veen_th @JeromeTaylor @RichardBarrow @leunigcartoons pic.twitter.com/JbisWws7GE
— stephff cartoonist (@stephffart) January 9, 2019
Make America demonic again.
Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
The Fire fighters’ union responds:
As Californians struggle to recover from a series of devastating wildfires, the president of the United States has launched another impulsive, reckless and uninformed tweet threatening to halt federal funding dedicated to helping fire fighters keep their communities safe.
“This is yet another unimaginable attack on the dedicated professionals who put everything on the line, including their own homes, to protect their neighborhoods,” says Harold Schaitberger, General President of the International Association of Fire Fighters. “While our president is tweeting on the sidelines in DC, our fellow Americans 3,000 miles to the west are mourning loved ones, entire communities have been wiped off the map and thousands of people are still trying to figure out where they are going to call home.”
“The president’s tweet is disgraceful at a time when the government is under a self-imposed shutdown and the citizens of Paradise haven’t even been at their home sites in 30 days,” says President of the California Professional Firefighters Brian Rice. “This important funding would go toward literally helping this city rise from the ashes. To withhold it in a game of politics is insulting to the people of Paradise.”
President-elect of CAL FIRE Local 2881 Tim Edwards says, “A more responsible president, Theodore Roosevelt, realized the uniqueness of the West and the complex geography of our wildlands. The fire fighters who protect these precious forests, at the risk to their lives, safety and their own homes, understand that drought and climate change have made our task more difficult. Now is the time for us to work collaboratively for solutions, not to make unfair, dangerous assessments.”
Last year, unprecedented wildfire destruction in California burned an area larger than the state of Rhode Island — the Camp Fire, with 48 dead, is the deadliest wildfire in California history.
Wildfire season has now become a year-round event, with short-staffed departments and exhausted fire fighters spending weeks at a time on the frontline doing their best to keep communities safe. Further reduction of resources will only make things more dangerous for fire fighters and the citizens they have sworn to protect.
Yes, Trump really did say he has “ordered FEMA to send no more money” – not will order but has ordered.
Whether the president even has the authority to rescind FEMA funding that has already been approved remains unclear. Guidelines for the way federal dollars flow after the president declares a national disaster, [as] he did after devastating wildfires in California this year, are outlined in the Stafford Act, said Rafael Lemaitre, the former director of public affairs for FEMA under the Obama administration.
“I’m not aware of any mechanism where you can say, ‘I’m undeclaring a state of disaster,” Lemaitre said.
Or, probably, of any president who would want to, until now.
Individual assistance dollars help victims find temporary housing, pay for repairs to their homes or help them buy groceries, clothes or new furniture. The window to apply for this aid closes Jan. 31.
It is unknown if Trump’s threat to stop FEMA funding could threaten those still seeking undistributed money.
“FEMA individual assistance is a real lifeline for people in their greatest time of need,” Lemaitre said, “and to use the plight of survivors to push your political agenda is draconian.”
It’s evil, sadistic, cruel, unconscionable, psychopathic.
“It’s absolutely shocking for President Trump to suggest he would deny disaster assistance to communities destroyed by wildfire,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Attacking victims is yet another low for this president.”
And to do it apropos of nothing, in a fit of petulant narcissistic rage – it’s just stunning. He’d bite all our heads off if he could.
.@realDonaldTrump’s threat insults the memory of scores of Americans who perished in wildfires last year & thousands more who lost their homes. @GOPLeader must join me to condemn & call on POTUS to reassure millions in CA that our govt will be there for them in their time of need https://t.co/YZJQug9zh0
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) January 9, 2019
Last night he was on tv pretending to be all broken up about victims of violent crimes, and this morning he takes time out of watching tv to tell us he’s taking disaster relief funding away from victims of violent wildfires.
Oh my god.
President Donald Trump Wednesday announced that he has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop sending wildfire relief money to California.
In an early morning tweet, Mr. Trump blamed the state’s forest management for its recent slew of historically-large wildfires which have leveled entire communities up and down the state.
“Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forrest (sic) fires that, with proper Forrest (sic) Management, would never happen,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!”
I’m knocked breathless.
He has GOT to go.
Late Tuesday, FEMA announced that the deadline to apply for aid had been extended from Friday, Jan. 11, to Jan. 31. It’s unclear how Mr. Trump’s supposed new order could affect those applications. FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CBS2.
…
Going back to last summer, Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized California officials, alleging they are at fault for not doing enough to prevent the wildfires and threatening to withhold federal funding.
So now he’s punishing the people harmed by the fires. It’s astounding.
More lies pointed out.
We fact checked Trump's speech on immigration — he averaged one false claim every 34 seconds pic.twitter.com/slTm8lpapL
— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) January 9, 2019
I neither watched nor listened. I’m not a masochist.
My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.
Every day, Customs and Border Patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country. We are out of space to hold them, and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country.
Big lie right there. Many or most of them are not “illegal immigrants” but asylum seekers. It is fully legal and a human right to seek asylum. Trump doesn’t like that, but Trump’s dislike doesn’t make something not true.
Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.
Big lie. The crime rate is lower among immigrants.
This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.
Wtf is that supposed to mean?
And if Trump really thought of it as a humanitarian crisis and a crisis of the heart, he would talk about asylum seekers with sympathy instead of loathing and contempt.
In places he improves on Steven Miller’s scrip with interpolations of his own, like the two in this paragraph:
My administration has presented Congress with a detailed proposal to secure the border and stop the criminal gangs, drug smugglers, and human traffickers. It’s a tremendous problem. Our proposal was developed by law enforcement professionals and border agents at the Department of Homeland Security. These are the resources they have requested to properly perform their mission and keep America safe. In fact, safer than ever before.
Trumpisms in red. I don’t know that for certain, but those sure look like Trumpy blurts breaking up the more normal officialese.
The border wall would very quickly pay for itself. The cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year — vastly more than the $5.7 billion we have requested from Congress. The wall will also be paid for, indirectly, by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico.
And yet, as we all know, that’s not what he said. He said, several million times, that Mexico would pay for the wall. Mexico said like hell it would, but that never slowed Trump down. He said Mexico would pay for the wall, over and over and over.
Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders.
And precious lives are cut short by those who were born here, but at a higher rate. Immigrants as a group commit less crime, not more.
Over the last several years, I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible. I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, and the sadness gripping their souls.
How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?
To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask: Imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken?
He’s trying to emote people into thinking immigrants=murderers. It’s a variation on the blood libel, and it’s disgusting.
Sarah Haider of EXMNA:
It has been four years since the murder of 10 staff members of Charlie Hebdo. Remember “Je suis Charlie”? Remember, mere *days* after the massacre, “Je ne suis pas Charlie”? (Thread) 1/?
— Sarah Haider 👾 (@SarahTheHaider) January 8, 2019
“…The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not simple martyrs to the right to offend”, the writer continued,“they were ideologues”. And he was not alone- scores from the chattering class asserted opinions on the *content* of the speech for which cartoonists died. 3
— Sarah Haider 👾 (@SarahTheHaider) January 8, 2019
That was Teju Cole. I remember reading the piece with disgust.
In less free parts of the world the “violence veto” is an ever-present shadow looming over every writer, thinker, activist, and artist. In the West, it is easy to forget how extraordinarily precious a healthy, rich civil society is and how lucky we are to enjoy it. 5
— Sarah Haider 👾 (@SarahTheHaider) January 8, 2019
I think, however, we are *starting* to remember the importance of maintaining and supporting the foundations of liberal democracy – foundations like the freedom of speech. Yes, there is a rise in populism, and the farthest fringes of our politics are stronger than ever… 7
— Sarah Haider 👾 (@SarahTheHaider) January 8, 2019
It *won’t* require a miracle to get us back on track – just a bit of patience, compassion, and sacrifice. And while it is not good to linger too long on acts of violence and horror, let’s stop to honor those who have given everything and resolve to do our part. #JeSuisCharlie 9/9
— Sarah Haider 👾 (@SarahTheHaider) January 8, 2019
Ed Pilkington at the Guardian reports a very bad thing:
The Trump administration has stopped cooperating with UN investigators over potential human rights violations occurring inside America, in a move that delivers a major blow to vulnerable US communities and sends a dangerous signal to authoritarian regimes around the world.
Quietly and unnoticed, the state department has ceased to respond to official complaints from UN special rapporteurs, the network of independent experts who act as global watchdogs on fundamental issues such as poverty, migration, freedom of expression and justice. There has been no response to any such formal query since 7 May 2018, with at least 13 requests going unanswered.
Nor has the Trump administration extended any invitation to a UN monitor to visit the US to investigate human rights inside the country since the start of Donald Trump’s term two years ago in January 2017. Two UN experts have made official fact-finding visits under his watch – the special rapporteurs on extreme poverty and privacy – but both were invited initially by Barack Obama, who hosted 16 such visits during his presidency.
Two per year for Obama, zero in two years for Trump. Make America Great Again by not giving a damn about human rights? Is that the idea?
The timing of the break in relations with UN investigators coincides with the publication in June of the official findings of Philip Alston’s visit to the US to research poverty. As UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty, Alston castigated the Trump administration for aggravating levels of inequality that were already the most glaring in the western world.
Alston’s robust criticism was received badly by Nikki Haley, then US ambassador, who accused him of biased reporting. She hinted that the administration was minded to turn its back on international accountability by saying it was “patently ridiculous” that the UN should focus on America’s internal human rights standards when it could be looking into countries like Burundi.
Burundi. Why Burundi in particular? Could it be because…no, surely not.
It is not known whether the decision to sever cooperation with the UN monitors was directly related to the spat over Alston’s report. But emails seen by the Guardian involving top US state department officials in Geneva show that by July they were rebuffing contact with international agencies on grounds that they were “considering how best to engage with special procedures”, the blanket term for the network of UN special rapporteurs.
…
Paradoxically, the Trump administration’s decision to shun the UN’s independent watchdogs places the US among a tiny minority of uncooperative states. There are very few countries that resist international oversight from UN special rapporteurs – one of them is North Korea.
Individual UN experts expressed dismay at the US cold shoulder they are now receiving. Alston said the move would set “the most unfortunate precedent as the US has always tried to press other countries to be accountable. This sends a message that you can opt out of routine scrutiny if you don’t like what is being said about your record on human rights.”
Felipe González Morales, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, has twice approached the US government requesting a formal visit to inspect how the country is handling immigration including the crisis at the Mexican border – once in March and then in July. He has yet to receive a reply.
“In the absence of an official visit, we cannot publish a country report to be presented to the UN human rights council,” he said.
This is really appalling and disgusting.
