Category Archives: Viva!

‘Tourists go home, refugees welcome’: why Barcelona chose migrants over visitors

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Increasingly it is tourism, not immigrants, that Barcelonans see as a threat to their city, though numbers of both have skyrocketed in recent years

Early last year, around 150,000 people in Barcelona marched to demand that the Spanish government allow more refugees into the country. Shortly afterwards, “Tourists go home, refugees welcome” started appearing on the city’s walls; soon the city was inundated with protestors marching behind the slogans “Barcelona is not for sale” and “We will not be driven out”.

What the Spanish media dubbed turismofobia overtook several European cities last summer, with protests held and measures taken in Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Florence, Berlin, Lisbon, Palma de Mallorca and elsewhere in Europe against the invasion of visitors. But in contrast to many, as fiercely as Barcelona has pushed back against tourists, it has campaigned to welcome more refugees. When news broke two weeks ago that a rescue ship carrying 629 migrants was adrift in the Mediterranean, mayor Ada Colau was among the first to offer those aboard safe haven.

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Trump officials don’t get to eat dinner in peace – not while kids are in cages | Jessica Valenti

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Sarah Sanders is the latest official to learn that there is a price to pay for enabling Trump’s cruel policies

Republicans are very worried about “civility” these days. They’re mad that the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, was forced to leave a Washington DC restaurant after being confronted by protesters, upset that Stephen Miller was called a fascist when the White House adviser was eating Mexican food, and horrified that the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant by the establishment’s owner. Some young Trump supporters in DC are even down in the dumps that they can’t seem to get a date.

We’re told that the left is being intolerant at best, and at worst – as one Fox News contributor put it – a “mob” that is “approaching near anarchy”.

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EU tariffs force Harley-Davidson to move some production out of US – business live

Made in China and Poland

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Motorcycle manufacturer warns that EU tariffs will force it to move work overseas, as Donald Trump’s trade spat hits US companies

Earlier:

2.13pm BST

Here’s some reaction to Harley-Davidson’s plans to move some US production overseas, from former White House press spokesman Tony Fratto.

On this beautiful Monday morning, #TradeWars remain stupid…

Harley-Davidson motorcycles exported to the EU will cost the company about $2,200 more, as it shifts production overseas to offset EU tariffs https://t.co/qFaPSn5bCK via @WSJ

This is how you win a trade war. NOT. Harley-Davidson to Shift Some U.S. Production in Wake of Tariffs – TheStreet https://t.co/KhJtuBOOWV

Trump, last year: “Thank you Harley-Davidson for building things in America.”
Tying it to winning WI in 2016: “I want to thank the people of Wisconsin. Great people. Amazing people. And they get it.” https://t.co/dlzui62PkQ

1.59pm BST

CNN has a good first take on the Harley-Davidson news:

The company is shifting some production of motorcycles for European customers out of the United States to avoid EU retaliatory tariffs.

Harley-Davidson will move some production out of the US to avoid EU retaliatory tariffs https://t.co/7j8nc9XKOQ pic.twitter.com/Gi941KMopt

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Trump repeats call to deport undocumented migrants without due process

Anyone accused by ICE of illegally entering the country could be immediately deported even if actually American citizens, refugees, on a green card and just picked up at a whim! This has, of course already happened and only intervention by the courts and lawyers have the gross errors and kidnappings been over turned! All Hail Dictator wannabee Trump!

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  • Summary deportations would avoid ‘long … legal process’
  • President insists suspension of rights ‘is the only real answer’

Donald Trump on Monday again issued a call to deprive undocumented immigrants of their right to due process, arguing that people trying to cross the border should be summarily deported without a trial or an appearance before a judge.

Trump’s sustained attacks on the American judicial system come amid extraordinary condemnation of his administration’s zero-tolerance enforcement policy at the southern border, which led to more than 2,300 children being separated from their families in recent months. Trump last week was pressured into halting his administration’s practice of separating families, in an abrupt reversal that overruled the views of his hardline advisers.

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This Is the Quintessential Trump Lie

This Is the Quintessential Trump Lie:

seandotpolitics:

Donald Dumbass claimed to the press that one of the reason he was so desperate to meet with Kim Jong Un was so that he could arrange to have the remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean War (1950-1953). “Thousands” of parents of those fallen soldiers had asked him on the campaign trail to bring back their remains.

This is truly a vintage Trumpian lie. As many have pointed out already… those parents would be a minimum of 101 years old today. More likely, they’d be at least 110. The idea that multiple 110-year-old people came up to Donald Trump on the campaign trail to ask him to bring home the remains of their son killed on North Korean soil 63 years prior is just absurd…

In that way, this is a quintessential Trumpian lie: totally shameless, easily verifiable as false, and rooted in the notion that “many people”—who are never defined further, and who you’ll never be able to find—are telling the president something that he just happens to agree with himself.

Trump’s act of state terrorism against children

State terrorism comes in many forms, but one of its most cruel and revolting expressions is when it is aimed at children. Even though U.S. President Donald Trump backed down in the face of a scathing political and public outcry and ended his administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents, make no mistake: […]

Is Your Congress Member Taking Money From Companies Profiting Off Family Detention?

Follow the money and let your representative what you know about where they git their money.

Defense contractors and for-profit immigrant detention facilities are cashing in on the Trump Administration’s child internment camps.

As the Trump Administration moves to indefinitely detain immigrant families, including those seeking asylum from violence and persecution, defense contractors have leapt to turn a profit. The government spends about $298 per day to hold just one person in a family detention center; as Trump’s “zero-tolerance” overloads existing facilities, immigrant internment camps are a perverse big business. The Daily Beast reports that defense contractors with more experience serving the CIA than refugees are hiring, anticipating new contracts in the business of keeping children in cages. As these companies angle for lucrative contracts to run sprawling detention centers for tens of thousands of immigrants, they’ve also made sizeable donations to American legislators of both parties.Those donations buy them influence with a GOP-led Congress that could end child detention any time they want to — but is pursuing anti-immigrant policies (which enrich detention contractors) instead.

No politician in the United States should accept blood money from companies literally ripping children away from their mothers’ breasts or imprisoning families. Yet Feministing found dozens of Congress members (on both sides of the aisle) who’ve taken checks from an industry built on holding immigrants in internment camps. Below is a list of Members of Congress who’ve accepted donations from just a few of these companies.

Let’s make it politically toxic to take this money. You can call your representatives at 202-225-3121 and your Senators at 202-224-3121 — tell them to return these donations and pledge never to take money from for-profit detention facilities again. Not sure who your representatives are? Find out here.

CORECIVIC: For-Profit Baby Jails

CoreCivic – the private prison conglomerate formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America – has a $1 billion contract with the U.S. government to detain immigrant families, and the company has netted $71.6 million in revenue from just one massive family-detention facility in Dilley, Texas. If that’s not bad enough, Mother Jones reports that CoreCivic earns higher profit margins detaining children than adult men.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan research group tracking the effects of money on public policy, CoreCivic spent $840,000 lobbying public officials last year. Over the course of the 2016 and 2018 campaign cycles, federal candidates received $474,777 from CoreCivic (this money doesn’t come from CoreCivic itself, but from associated PACs, owners, or employees donating $200 or more). Here’s which Members of Congress are benefiting from CoreCivic’s campaign donations and by extension, their work imprisoning children:

Senators Receiving $150 or more from CoreCivic:

  • Rob Portman (R-OH): $12,500 (2018 cycle)
  • Jeff Flake (R-AZ): $5,000 (2018)
  • Bob Corker (R-TN): $5,128 (2016 + 2018)
  • Mike Crapo (R-ID): $5,000 (2018)
  • John Hoeven (R-ND): $9,000 (2016 + 2018)
  • John Boozman (R-AR): $3,000 (2016)
  • Orrin Hatch (R-UT): $5,000 (2016 + 2018)
  • Martin Heinrich (D-NM): $2,500 (2018)
  • Kelly Ayotte (R-NH): $2,500 (2016)
  • Roy Blunt (R-MO): $2,500 (2016)
  • Jon Tester (D-MT): $5,000 (2016 + 2018)
  • Marco Rubio (R-FL): $2,500 (2016)
  • Johnny Isakson (R-GA): $2,500 (2016)
  • Jerry Moran (R-KS): $2,500 (2016)
  • John McCain (R-AZ): $1,000 (2016)
  • Tim Scott (R-SC): $1,000 (2016)
  • Ron Wyden (D-OR): $1,000 (2016)
  • Maggie Hassan (D-NH): $500 (2016)
  • Claire McCaskill (D-MO): $250 (2016)
  • Ted Cruz (R-TX): $150 (2016)

House Members Receiving $150 or more from CoreCivic:

  • Paul Ryan (Speaker, R-WI): $5,000 (2016)
  • Kevin McCarthy (House Majority Leader, R-CA): $2,500 (2016)
  • Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): $24,100 (2016 + 2018)
  • Jon Culberson (R-TX): $22,500 (2016 + 2018)
  • Chuck Fleishmann (R-TN): $11,200 (2016)
  • Will Hurd (R-TX): $7,500 (2016)
  • John Rose (R-TN): $5,500 (2018)
  • John Carter (R-TX): $5,000 (2016)
  • Ander Crenshaw: $5,000 (2016)
  • Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ): $5,000 (2016)
  • Tim Ryan (D-OH): $4,500 (2016)
  • Greg Pence (R-IN): $3,500 (2018)
  • Diane Black (R-TN): $13,500 (2016 + 2018)
  • Gregg Harper (R-MS): $6,500 (2016 + 2018)
  • Scott Desjarlis (R-TN): $3,000 (2016)
  • Michale McCaul (R-TK): $5,500 (2016 + 2018)
  • Hal Rogers (R-KY): $2,500 (2018)
  • Scott Taylor (R-VA): $2,500 (2018)
  • Robert Aderholt (R-AL): $2,500 (2016)
  • Kevin Brady (R-TX): $2,500 (2016)
  • Mike Conaway(R-TX): $2,500 (2016)
  • Henry Cuellar (D-TX): $6,500 (2016 + 2018)
  • David Kustoff (R-TN): $4,750 (2016 + 2018)
  • Martha Roby (R-AL): $2,500 (2016)
  • Todd Young (R-IN): $2,500 (2016)
  • David Joyce (R-OH): $2,000 (2016)
  • Mike Kelly (R-PA): $2,000 (2016)
  • Tom Graves (R-GA): $1,500 (2016)
  • Lamar Smith (R-TX): $1,500 (2016)
  • Paul Babeu (R-AZ): $1,000 (2016)
  • Steve Fincher (R-TN): $3,700 (2016 + 2018)
  • Bob Goodlatte (R-VA): $1,000 (2016)
  • Richard Hudson (R-NC): $1,000 (2016)
  • Pat Tiberi (R-OH): $1,000 (2016)
  • David Valadao (R-CA): $1,000 (2016)
  • Jim Cooper (D-TN): $500 (2016)

GENERAL DYNAMICS: Handling Paperwork for the Detention Machine

General Dynamics is a multinational defense contracting giant best known for building combat jets, tanks, and submarines for the US military. General Dynamics stresses that they don’t have a role in constructing or operating detention facilities for separated children. Yet the company appears to provide bureaucratic support for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the federal agency overseeing separated children, making money by pushing around paperwork that keeps immigrant families in prisons.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, General Dynamics accounted for $2,151,362 in campaign contributions for the 2018 campaign cycle (again, via PACs, owners, or employees giving $200 or more). Because of the sheer number of Members of Congress who received General Dynamics money, we’ve limited the below list to those who received $5,000 or more during the 2018 campaign cycle – you can view the many more who’ve received smaller amounts here.

Senators Receiving Money from General Dynamics:

  • Angus King (I-ME): $35,500 (2018)
  • Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): $32,500 (2018)
  • Chris Murphy (D-CT): $28,541 (2018)
  • Debbie Stabenow (D-MI): $25,250 (2018)
  • Jack Reed (D-RI): $13,450 (2018)
  • Sherrod Brown (D-OH): $13,010 (2018)
  • Gary Peters (D-MI): $13,000 (2018)
  • Bill Nelson (D-FL): $12,050 (2018)
  • Claire McCaskill (D-MO): $11,185 (2018)
  • Bob Casey (D-PA): $9,561 (2018)
  • Tim Kaine (D-VA): $9,121 (2018)
  • Deb Fischer (R-NE): $9,000 (2018)
  • Ted Cruz (R-TX): $8235 (2018)
  • John A Barraso (R-WY): $7,000 (2018)
  • Joe Donnelly (D-IN): $7,000 (2018)
  • Tammy Baldwin (D-WI): $6,005 (2018)
  • Roger Wicker (R-MS): $5,125 (2018) 

Representatives Receiving Money from General Dynamics:

  • Paul Ryan (Speaker, R-WI): $10,100 (2018)
  • Kevin McCarthy (Majority Leader, R-CA): $5,000 (2018)
  • Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NK): $27,900 (2018)
  • Pete Visclosky (D-IN): $16,000 (2018)
  • Ken Calvert (R-CA): $14,800 (2018)
  • Rob Wittman (R-VA): $13,700 (2018)
  • Kyrsen Sinema (D-AZ): $13,200 (2018)
  • Joe Courtney (D-CT): $12,700 (2018)
  • Duncan Hunter (R-CA): $12,500 (2018)
  • Jim Langevin (D-RI): $11,750 (2018)
  • Will Hurd (T-TX): $11,100 (2018)
  • Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL): $11,000  (2018)
  • Bruce Poliquin (R-ME): $10,500 (2018)
  • Martha McSally (R-AZ): $10,280 (2018)
  • Robert Aderholt (R-AL): $10,000 (2018)
  • Sanford Bishop (D-GA): $10,000 (2018)
  • Kay Granger (R-TX): $10,000 (2018)
  • Tom Graves (R-GA): $10,000 (2018)
  • David Joyce (R-OH): $10,000 (2018)
  • Patrick McHenry (R-NC): $10,000 (2018)
  • Devin Nunes (R-CA): $10,000 (2018)
  • Tim Ryan (D-OH): $10,000 (2018)
  • Steve Scalise (R-LA): $10,000 (2018)
  • Steve Stivers (R-OH): $10,000 (2018)
  • Michael Turner (R-OH): $10,000 (2018)
  • John Moolenaar (R-MI): $9,000 (2018)
  • Kevin Yoder (R-KS): $9,000 (2018)
  • Chellie Pingree (D-ME): $8,750 (2018)
  • Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD): $8,250 (2018)
  • Buddy Carter (R-GA): $8,000 (2018)
  • Rosa L DeLauro (D-CT): $8,000 (2018)
  • Martha Rboy (R-AL): $7,500 (2018)
  • Austin Scott (R-GA): $7,500 (2018)
  • Gerry Connolly (D-VA): $7,010 (2018)
  • Joe Kennedy III (D-MA): $7,007 (2018)
  • Henry Cuellar (D-TX): $7,000 (2018)
  • John Culberson (R-TX): $7,000 (2018)
  • Ruben Gallego (D-AZ): $7,000 (2018)
  • Doug Collins (R-GA): $6,750 (2018)
  • Charlie Crist (D-FL): $6,500 (2018)
  • Pete King (R-NY): $6,500 (2018)
  • Pete Aguilar (D-CA): $6,023 (2018)
  • Donald John Bacon (R-NE): $6,000 (2018)
  • Matt Conaway (R-TX): $6,000 (2018)
  • Paul Cook (R-CA): $6,000 (2018)
  • Mike Gallagher (R-WI): $6,000
  • Steve Knight (R-CA): $6,000 (2018)
  • Mike Rodgers (R-AL): $6,000 (2018)
  • Adam Smith (D-WA): $6,000 (2018)
  • Juan Vargas (D-CA): $6,000 (2018)
  • Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO): $5,500 (2018)
  • Karen Handel (R-GA): $5,500 (2018)
  • Brian Mast (R-FL): $5,500 (2018)
  • Michael McCaul (R-TX): $5,500 (2018)
  • Paul Mitchell (R-MI): $5,500 (2018)
  • Seth Moulten (D-MA): $5,500 (2018)
  • Scott W Taylor (R-VA): $5,500 (2018)
  • Mac Thornberry (R-TX): $5,500 (2018)
  • Marc Veasey (D-TX): $5,500 (2018)
  • Rob Woodall (R-GA): $5,500 (2018)
  • Jim Banks (R-IN): $5,000 (2018)
  • Mike Bost (R-IL): $5,000 (2018)
  • Steny Hoyer (D-MD): $5,000 (2018)
  • Don Norcross (D-NJ): $5,000 (2018)
  • Peter Roskam (R-IL): $5,000 (2018)
  • Chris Stewart (R-UT): $5,000 (2018)
  • Pat Tiberi (R-OH): $5,000 (2018)
  • Brad Wenstrup (R-OH): $5,000 (2018) 

MVM INC: The Former CIA Contractor Transporting Kids to Detention Camps

MVM Inc is a “private security contractor” which maintained contracts supplying guards in Iraq, until it lost a massive CIA contract in 2008. In recent years, the company has shifted heavily into running detention centers for immigrants. According to the Daily Beast, MVM has multiple multi-million dollar contracts with ICE and ORR for transporting immigrant children to detention centers – including the McAllen, Texas facility where U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkeley reported seeing children in “cages that looks a lot like dog kennels” and kids ripped from their parents’ arms. The contractor helped transport children forcibly separated from their parents.

Dario Marquez, Jr., the Co-Founder of MVM, makes substantial campaign donations every year. From 2017–18, FEC filings show that Marquez donated to the following campaigns:


Image Credit: Indivisible Denver

I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.

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by Hannah Dreier

There’s one thing everyone can agree with President Donald Trump on about the street gang MS-13: The group specializes in spectacular violence. Its members attack in groups, in the woods, at night, luring teens to their deaths with the promise of girls or weed. One Long Island boy told me he doesn’t go to parties anymore because he worries any invitation could be a trap. A victim’s father showed me a death certificate that said his son’s head had been bashed in, then lowered his voice and added that the boy’s bones had been marked by machete slashes, but he didn’t want the mother to know that. A teenager who has left the gang told me he considers himself dead already, and is just trying to make sure MS-13 doesn’t kill his family.

I’m spending the year reporting on MS-13 members and their associates. I’ve been combing through their text messages. I’m talking with the detectives building cases against killers not yet old enough to buy cigarettes. And I’ve been spending long evenings with the gang’s victims, who often start crying as soon as they start talking about the violence that has marred their lives. Everyone agrees the gang is bloodthirsty. Most of the other assertions I’ve heard from the Trump administration this year about MS-13 have almost no connection to what I’m seeing on the ground.

1. MS-13 Is Not Organizing to Foil Immigration Law

Trump often talks about how MS-13 has carried out a string of murders in the suburbs outside New York City. One of the first things I did when I started reporting was talk to the ex-girlfriend of the gang leader charged with ordering six of those killings in 2016 and 2017. The girl sat at a Panera Bread in a Long Island strip mall and told how he had kidnapped and raped her shortly after her 15th birthday, threatened her family, and forced her to get a tattoo of his name on her arm. As I talked to her, I imagined a man like the ones I had seen in news reports on MS-13 — chins jutted out, arms strong from lifting weights, and gothic tattoos of the letters M and S on their faces and chests. I was shocked when I eventually saw this gang leader in court; he was a baby-faced 19-year-old who blushed when girls waved to him from the gallery. The indictment against him laid out killings that were ordered in response to adolescent trash talking.

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called MS-13 the most brutal of the gangs driving the drug trade, and promised to go after the group like the government went after mob boss Al Capone. Really, experts have found the gang has barely any role in the international drug trade. The Congressional Research Service said that it could be misleading to call MS-13 a transnational criminal organization at all, because it has no central leader or global ambitions. The gang is made up of sometimes competing cliques, often led by teenagers most interested in wielding power over other young people in their immediate circles.

On Long Island, a detective told me police officers call MS-13 members “mighty munchkins,” because they have often not yet hit their growth spurts and tend to commit their crimes in large groups. They meet at night because, while other criminal organizations have massive international revenue streams, these guys — even the leaders — have to work menial jobs and sometimes go to school during the day. Each clique has its own shot caller, and its own hyperlocal focus. On Long Island, the gang’s focus has often been on controlling the halls of a single high school.

2. MS-13 Is Not Posing as Fake Families at the Border

In justifying the policy of child separation last week, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said, “The kids are being used as pawns by the smugglers and the traffickers. Those are traffickers, those are smugglers and that is MS-13.” The theory is that Central American gang leaders are showing up at the border falsely claiming to be the parents of children, and are also instructing unaccompanied minors to go to the U.S. and claim territory.

Actually, there have been fewer than 200 cases of false family claims this year — a fraction of 1 percent of the total number of families apprehended at the border — and there is no indication that any of those cases involved MS-13. Of the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors that have come to the U.S. since 2012, Border Patrol says only 56 were suspected of MS-13 ties.

The gang is trying to find new members, but there’s no need to step on the toes of the Mexican gangs that control human smuggling to do it. Long Island teenagers tell me that when they show up to school, gang members sit down next to them at lunch and ask them to join. Many— worn down by loneliness, boredom and the threat of violence if they try to refuse — accept the invitation.

People who study MS-13 agree that when young gang members travel from El Salvador to the U.S., they are driven by the same economic factors driving other Central American immigrants. Even the 19-year-old gang leader charged with six murders on Long Island told his ex-girlfriend he was not a member of the gang when he came to the U.S. from El Salvador. He said it was only later, in the New York suburbs, that he was recruited.

And some MS-13 members are born right here. The Suffolk County Police Department examined a sample of active MS-13 members and found that just a quarter had come to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors. The natural conclusion: This is not a border issue. It’s a recruitment issue.

3. MS-13 Is Sticking Around, but It’s Not Growing

Trump talks about the gang as if it is suddenly taking over. “The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S.,” he wrote in a tweet.

MS-13 has been stubbornly persistent, but it remains a boutique criminal organization, accounting for a tiny portion of 1.4 million gang members nationwide. Trump’s Justice Department says there are about 10,000 MS-13 members in the U.S., the same number as 10 years ago. There’s also nothing new about MS-13 alarmism. Back in 2005, Newsweek ran a cover story about the group, citing its 10,000 members, under the headline, “The most dangerous gang in America.”

On Long Island, the murder people cite most often when talking about MS-13’s brutality is the killing of a two-year-old and his mother back in 2010. But the gang’s history goes back much further than that; the FBI set up a Long Island task force to crack down on the gang in 2003. And MS-13 never invaded the U.S at all. It was founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and then mixed with California prison gang culture and was exported to El Salvador.

The group remains significantly smaller than the Crips, the Bloods and the Latin Kings; it’s also smaller than several gangs you’ve probably never heard of, like the Gangster Disciples in Chicago. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, which has been labeled an extremist group for its anti-immigrant ideology, can’t come up with more than an average of 35 murders per year attributed to MS-13 — far fewer than that Chicago gang you didn’t know existed.

MS-13 is not the largest, the most violent, or the fastest-growing gang, but it is the U.S. gang most strongly tied to Central America, which is where the majority of asylum-seeking teenagers come from. In that way, it’s the perfect focal point for Trump’s message of closed borders.

4. MS-13 Is Preying on a Specific Community, Not the Country at Large

When confronted last week with audio obtained by ProPublica of wailing children separated from their parents, White House Communications Adviser Mercedes Schlapp said, “What’s very heartbreaking is to watch Americans who have lost their children because of the MS-13 gang members.” But the vast majority of MS-13 victims are young immigrants, many of them undocumented.

I often think about this when I’m out reporting. This year, I have reached out to current gang members and added them as friends on Facebook. I’ve visited the homes of people on the local clique’s kill list, and heard their police-issued panic buttons hum under tables and behind doors. I’ve explored the wooded areas Long Island police call “the killing fields,” where bodies have been found. I feel safe doing this because MS-13 rarely goes after true outsiders — people who are not friends with any gang members or targets for recruitment. The closest I’ve found in Long Island to a totally random victim was a worker at a Central American deli who was hurt when a bullet passed through the head of a targeted victim.

The White House put out a statement last month that described recent murders carried out by “MS-13 animals.” Lost in the controversy over whether it was OK to call gang members animals was the fact that of the six identified victims, five were immigrants and the other was a child of immigrants.

5. Immigration Raids and Deportation Can Only Go So Far

Secretary Nielsen said last week that the presence of MS-13 in the U.S. is “the exclusive product of loopholes in our federal immigration laws.” The loopholes she is talking about are actually specific protections contained in United Nations conventions on refugees and torture, which the U.S. ratified. The U.S. is obligated to allow Central American immigrants to stay in the country while their asylum claims are processed, which can take years. If the person pleading asylum is a minor, they are supposed to be released to relatives.

But if U.S. officials determine that a teenager is a gang member, they stay in custody. And immigration officials can also re-detain teenagers who are recruited into MS-13 once they get here. Dozens of Long Island teenagers were re-detained last year on suspicion of gang ties. The problem is that it can be hard to tell who is in the gang and who is just adopting gang style. MS-13 has its own music and aesthetic, bound up in Central American pride. On Long Island, some immigrant teens use MS-13 markers as a fashion statement, the way American kids might once have worn the blue bandanas associated with the Crips because they liked Snoop Dogg.

I sat in on one hearing for a Long Island 17-year-old who had been detained for half a year after he wrote the El Salvador telephone code, “503,” in a notebook at school. He had spent some of that time in a detention center now under investigation for child abuse. At the hearing, an immigration judge ordered the teen released and openly mocked the gang charges. “I note that ‘503’ is an area code,” the judge said. “He may have had his grandmother’s phone number written in his notebook. We don’t know. But I think this is slim, slim evidence on which to base the continuing detention of an unaccompanied child.”

That’s not to say that all of the immigrant teenagers accused of gang affiliation are innocent. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested some 8,000 suspected MS-13 members in the past decade. If deportation was all it took, the gang would be gone by now.

So What?

This all matters because the gang really is terrorizing a portion of the population: young Latino immigrants in a few specific communities.

Last month, I accompanied the mother of a high school freshman killed by MS-13 to a Trump event on Long Island. Inside a government building, the president railed against the gang. “They killed a cop for the sake of making a statement. They wanted to make a statement, so they killed a cop,” he said. (They did not kill a cop.)

Outside, the mother drifted between a pro-Trump rally and a counter protest. She took tranquilizer pills so she could face local reporters, and then told them she was unsure if Trump really cared about victims like her. She said she hoped the president’s fixation on MS-13 might spur changes that will keep other kids from being attacked and recruited by the gang.

But for any policy to work, it needs to be rooted in reality.

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