I don’t know about you, but I think the following should be a disqualifying statement from a presidential candidate in the United States of America:
Washington (CNN) Pressed on how he would deport 11 million undocumented immigrants from the country, Donald Trump said Wednesday he would build a “deportation force.”
Trump was pressed for specifics on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” by co-host Mika Brzezinski, who asked if he would have a “massive deportation force.”
“You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely,” Trump said. “Don’t forget, Mika, that you have millions of people that are waiting in line to come into this country and they’re waiting to come in legally. And I always say the wall, we’re going to build the wall. It’s going to be a real deal. It’s going to be a real wall.”
It should be disqualifying. But he’ll probably get a spike in the polls from proposing that officials fan out, conduct house-to-house searches and load families into trucks. Because that’s what he’s really saying; no one is going to report voluntarily to a deportation force.
Hell, I’ve been discounting Trump’s chances because he’s such an obvious buffoon, but maybe he’ll win the nomination after all. This is your GOP front-runner, ladies and gentlemen, the party of small government and a massive deportation force.
Gotta give Trump credit, though; he has an instinct for bending the narrative. This is sure to come up during the next debate, and the discussion will give the base the opportunity to separate the jack-booted thugs from the immigrant-coddling candy-asses. We know which they prefer, don’t we?
[H/T: Valued commenter Rikyrah; photo: DailyMail — soldiers rounding up Bloody Sunday demonstrators, 1972]
beltane
“Deportation force” sounds like a clumsy translation from the German. This is why the teabaggers love Trump, he tickles their paramilitary loving pleasure spot.
schrodinger's cat
He will get a bump in the polls, the primary electorate will eat this up with a spoon.
Patricia Kayden
Trump has said so many things that should be disqualifying that his talk about a “deportation force” is no longer shocking. He’s successfully made us numb to his stupidity. Sigh.
Belafon
“First, we’ll separate the good legal Latinos from the illegals ones.”
“But what about the Europeans that are here illegally?”
“There are no illegal whites.”
Punchy
You know who else went house to house and loaded peeps on various transporation mechanisms for forced reassignment elsewhere?
Richard Mayhew
Do they get snazzy shirts in a single dark color?
schrodinger's cat
OT but kinda related.
The Indian state of Bihar rejected BJP’s scaremongering and gave India (and the world) bestest Diwali gift evah!
An in depth analysis. I have tried to give some historical background and a glimpse into why this was a battle for India’s soul.
schrodinger's cat
@Belafon: Actually there are, in NYC mostly, about 100,000 or so Irish. It was covered in NYT when immigration reform was being discussed in the Dubya Era. I also remember some reporting about how Ted Kennedy met with them etc.,
Plus people who overstay their visa are not all Messican.
debbie
@Patricia Kayden:
Trump also never thinks ahead. What will he do when there’s no one to manicure his lawns?
Pogonip
Wouldn’t happen for the same reason a house-to-house gun search will never happen: not enough money or manpower.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Belafon:
As my (Republican) dad always said, one of the reasons Ted Kennedy was so big on amnesty for illegal immigrants is that Kennedy knew how many illegal Irish immigrants were working under the table in Boston.
Frankly, our whole damn immigration system is screwed up, and even people who did everything right and have all of their paperwork still have to submit everything three times just to be told “no.” It’s so Byzantine that I’m not surprised many people just say “fuck it” and decide to fly under the radar rather than deal with 10 years or more of bureaucracy.
dedc79
When Trump brought up this idea of a deportation force, I’ll admit to immediately picturing something like Abe Simpson’s union busters.
Botsplainer
Hell, Trump could probably get a whole bunch of older white folks to volunteer to serve on it for free – those people are jackals about immigrants from Central America.
Amir Khalid
President Trump’s US Deportation Force sounds like COBRA might set up, not GI Joe.
Bobby Thomson
And otherwise smart people see Cruz (and worse, Rubio) as not only having a shot in this dynamic, but being odds on favorites as the last standing contestants for the Republican nomination.
Seems legit.
Betty Cracker
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I lived in Boston for four years. One of my roommates was an illegal Irish immigrant. She worked — I shit you not! — at the Social Security Administration.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Richard Mayhew:
They’ll have to wear black shorts. All of the shirts are already taken.
Where’s Bertie Wooster when you need him?
trollhattan
Already envisioning the rail cars needed for such a people-moving task.
Or is this to be a reverse-direction NAFTA highway?
MomSense
@schrodinger’s cat:
Thank you!
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Whoa. Sounds like a uniquely Boston experience.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yup. Something like 40-50% of “illegal aliens” in the US are people who overstayed their visas, or overstayed without a visa. Of course, we don’t have up-to-date numbers on that statistic because DHS doesn’t have sufficient funding to get a count.
It would be nice if our brainiac press corps would ask these Teabagger candidates how a huge classy wall on the Rio Grande is going to solve that.
We’d have a much better informed public, and a more sensible civic dialog, if the press would actually do its job.
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Also, too, if Obama used this cue to do an ICE raid on Trump’s hotels and other properties, I wouldn’t object, though I would feel sorry for the workers.
BGinCHI
@Punchy: Janet Napolitano?
Baud
He can call it the
SchutzstaffelTrumpsTaffel (TT).BGinCHI
@Betty Cracker: When I lived on the Cape in the late 80s (yes, I was a tiny baby), most of the bartenders and lots of the seasonal waitstaff were Irish illegals.
They also claimed that the Guinness was superior on the Cape because it was shipped illegally from Ireland.
I wish it were true.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: Granted, this was a decade before 9/11, so security was much looser, and she was a temp. But still. She used to laugh about being right under their noses.
@BGinCHI: I was there late 80s / early 90s and was also an infant at the time, naturally.
MattF
Wait, wait… jackbooted thugs are the ATF. Trump is talking about the HAMUAP– Humane And Monocolor Uniformed American Police.
schrodinger's cat
@MomSense: You are welcome! Any feedback/questions are much appreciated.
BGinCHI
@Betty Cracker: I lived in Boston summer of 1988 (around the corner from Beacon Hill at the corner of Cambridge st and Russell).
Saw a LOT of great music that summer and saw a lot of good films at the Brattle.
Even though I was a wee baby.
kc
Silver lining: Trump intends to create thousands of new government jobs.
schrodinger's cat
@BGinCHI: Guinness drinking baby!
kc
I just can’t believe that either Trump or Ben Carson actually WANTS to be president, and yet … they’re leading.
Matt Martin
I think the deportation group is a great idea! I already thought of a perfect name for it too: Government Evacuation of Spanish Talking Alien People Organization. What could we call it for short? Hmmm…
PurpleGirl
Woodside and Sunnyside (Queens) also has large numbers of Irish who have overstayed their visas. And they became trapped here when property/housing costs went through the roof in Ireland. They originally planned to earn an amount of cash here, save it and then go back. When property/housing went through the roof, they couldn’t do that. There was no way to really save more; the other problem was going back and then returning to the US. They are feeling trapped. (The hairdresser I used for several years was in this position.)
ETA: I have to go out for a few hours.
Betty Cracker
@BGinCHI: I was in the North End off Hanover. Ate lots of those lobster tail pastry things even though, as an infant, I lacked a full set of teeth.
Peale
Good. So he’s all in favor of rationalizing a system that has many ridiculous choke points and holds and quotas and inefficient rules to process that backlog as quickly as possible.
A guy
Speaking of rail cars, the hunger strike kid at UM is the son of a railroad executive whose compensation package is 8.4 million a year. Bet that’s in the top one percent. And the black gay student body president had to issue an apology yesterday for a lying tweet that he sent out claiming the KKK was on campus and he was working with the state police on the issue. Kid is nothing more than a lying kid it seems
Dork
How many Ameros is this going to cost?
The Gray Adder
@debbie: He lives in Manhattan. Nobody has a lawn there.
Amir Khalid
@kc:
Imagine a 2016 convention scenario where The Donald/Dr Ben shows up with a lead in the delegate count, but, anxious to preserve his grift, tries to
givesell the nominationaway. The party, frightened at the thought of some hopelessly weak candidate — Jeb, say — getting crushed by Democratic nominee Bernie Clinton, tries to out-maneouvre the billionaires lining up to buy the delegates off The Donald/Dr Ben.There’s a movie in this, I reckon: a pretty good political thriller.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I missed the debate, but I’d like to know whether they truly did ask the Republicans whether they’d have killed baby Hitler. I know that sounds too deranged to have happened, but, well, we’re talking about Republicans in 2015, so, in all truth, I can’t just discount that this might have happened.
Also, I hear Cruz told us that there were no panics when we were on the gold standard? What the hell?
@A guy:
What, this guy, again? Get the fuck out of here.
p.a.
@schrodinger’s cat:
Only read if you have nothing fragile nearby
Mr. Ng, who had no criminal record, overstayed a visa years ago and had been applying for a green card through his wife, a United States citizen…
p.s.- a for profit, privately owned prison
Betty Cracker
@A guy: Did you get a look at their countertops? Granite or laminate?
A guy
Rich railroad kid has granite
Lying student body president has laminate
trollhattan
@The Gray Adder:
The Donald has Central Park for his front lawn; it’s YOOOOGE. Am surprised he doesn’t have it mowed to read “TRUMP”
Gravenstone
@schrodinger’s cat: I do believe that was snark. As in, “if they’re white, they are de facto legal.”
gratuitous
I hope no reporter is so churlish as to try to gotcha Mr. Trump by asking how his Deportation Force is going to be paid for.
? Martin
@schrodinger’s cat:
Most are not, btw. Over half of undocumented just in the last year were asian. We need to build a wall between us and China, apparently.
schrodinger's cat
@p.a.: Sadly not surprising. I have even read about US citizens getting caught in an immigration dragnet and spending days in a detention facility.
Snarkworth
OK. Box cars might work for the Mexicans. How’s Thump going to transport several million Chinese? Europeans? He’d need lots of planes. Would they be entitled to one carry-on bag each? Pretzels? It gets complicated fast.
? Martin
@Snarkworth: I think its apparent that everyone gets deported to Mexico regardless of where they came from.
max
@Belafon: “First, we’ll separate the good legal Latinos from the illegals ones.”
Dis oparation gonna bee YUUGGGGEEE! No time to sort them out! De good wons gonna cum back, see? Den we stamp de ones commun back with eh big red stamp.
max
[‘Quality Mexican, dats whats it gonna say.’]
schrodinger's cat
@Gravenstone: I know it was snark. But there is a difference between de facto legal and legal. Those who have overstayed their visas cannot leave the country, if they do it is next to impossible to comeback.
p.a.
@gratuitous: We have it covered here at Balloon Juice: spiffy uniforms. There’ll be plenty of volunteers. Always a certain % of the population, no matter the form of gvt (to paraphrase Göring).
A guy
• Substantially increase resources available to control the Southern border, and other entry points, in order to prevent illegal immigration.
Jimmy Carte, august 4 1977
max
Hell, I’ve been discounting Trump’s chances because he’s such an obvious buffoon, but maybe he’ll win the nomination after all. This is your GOP front-runner
As, see, you have made the mistake of listening to the MSM, who wish you to not believe your lying eyes when you cast the peepers upon yon polls. Responsible, decent Republicans will sort this out and form a nice bipartisan relationship with Michael Bloomberg to fix this country’s problems after all. Then we can get some nice tax cuts for the good people.
max
[‘It could happen. No, really.’]
ThresherK (GPad)
@trollhattan: How about a pipeline? Or are the right wing less concerned if a pipeline leaks oil and chemicals than if it leaks brown-skinned folks?
(I cannot guarantee this idea isn’t already a,blueprint somewhere.)
burnspbesq
@PurpleGirl:
Before the collapse of the Irish property bubble in around 2008, it was not unheard of for Dubliners with money to go “bargain-hunting” in New York. I remember reading that in the Irish Times on my first visit to Dublin in 2007 and finding it hard to believe, but it was in fact true.
p.a.
We could put GW in charge. Everyone he fingers to toss, stays. Every one he gives a thumbs up will be al Qaeda or ISIS, gets arrested.
Amir Khalid
@schrodinger’s cat:
There’s a song about that.
JPL
A few years ago, TX tried to pass a law that penalized those who hired undocumented immigrants. Once the good folks realized that it affected The Help, there was a backlash. The final law excluded the household help.
The immigrants are bad unless they are ones that help you out.
NorthLeft12
@schrodinger’s cat: Perhaps they need to build a wall at JFK and Logan too. That will show those damn socialistic Europeans what for!
tsquared2001
@Pogonip: THAT was exactly what I thought of when I heard Trump’s plan – rounding up people is all good but getting ahead of the guns is a bridge too far.
The sheer willful ignorance, the hoops that need to be jumped through by our corporate media in order to act like any of those motherfuckers are ready to be president of the United States – if it wasn’t so worrisome, I would have to doff my hat. Talk about huge ass huevos.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
So the Koch brothers are allowed to openly buy presidential candidates but it’s the Worst Thing Ever for a rich kid to be a liberal?
Your hypocrisy is showing again. Better zip that up.
Snarkworth
@ThresherK (GPad): Oh, I love the idea of a pipeline, at least for the Spanish-speaking folk who are all going to Mexico whether that’s where they came from or not.
Now the question is, would they walk through the pipeline? Or would you mix them with a liquid to form a kind of slurry?
Gindy51
@Punchy: We did, US folks of Japanese lineage got shoved in to US camps back in the 40’s. I know one man of that era and he is a Trump man all the way. Amazing……
ruemara
Maybe fascism is the conservative job creation program they can get behind.
srv
@gratuitous: By the swelling tax base as Americans go back to work. Also the huge welfare, health and educational savings to be had.
Can finally put those FEMA camps to good use. Wouldn’t that be ironic.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Snarkworth: Fluid dynamics suggest pouring them in the US end fast enough would do the trick.
NorthLeft12
@gratuitous:
Are you kidding me? There are thousands of right wing gun humpers who will be eager to pay Preznut Trump for the opportunity to put on a uniform and round up them foreigners. Hell, they will supply their own guns and ammo too.
WereBear
@tsquared2001: I wish I had the science fiction ability to have the ghosts of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Hunter S. Thompson visit them on Christmas Eve…
p.a.
@ruemara: but conservatives hate trains.
A guy
Mnemosyne- he can be what he want. I just demand he admit his black railroad executive privilege. He can be liberal (course we are just stereotyping that he is a liberal cause we really don’t know). In fact I bet he gave the food he refused to eat to a homeless person just to prove it!
trollhattan
@Snarkworth:
Maybe this is the opening Hyperloop has been waiting for.
trollhattan
@A guy:
I dub thee Gumby.
ThresherK
PS This snippet from Frisky Dingo is always in the conversation of crazy things people may forget are crazy.
(*This is the expurgated version.)
Germy Shoemangler
The corporatocracy commands you to love your country
Tom the Dancing Bug
Goblue72
Trump ain’t gonna be the nominee. Nor Carson. We aren’t even in the serious part of the primary season yet. Most voters are focused on Turkey and Xmas shopping right now. First handful of primaries aren’t until February. The real calendar doesn’t start till March.
Right now, we are just in a holding pattern until the kiddie table also rans get around to dropping out.
Germy Shoemangler
@srv:
In low wage jobs, of course. We workers need to be globally competitive.
A guy
I’m Gumby dammit!
Eric U.
the DepoForce(TM) will not have to be yuooooge, because it will rely on snitches. Oh wait, the snitches will overload the system calling in their neighbors.
tsquared2001
@WereBear: That would be dope. Would it work? I’m not sure if our failed media experiment has a shame switch that can actually be flipped.
I tweet at Chris Hayes most evenings & they had a segment on Monday where the gist was that this insane election season is really the voters fault. Voters have asked for it and they are gonna get it good and hard. The press’ hands are clean. Do we not teach the responsibility of a free press in this country anymore? Been a while since I’ve been in school but things can’t have changed that much.
Germy Shoemangler
Gumby
Origuy
A song about an undocumented Irish immigrant: The Back Door by Cherish The Ladies with Cathie Ryan
tsquared2001
@A guy: Black railroad executive privilege is my new band name.
schrodinger's cat
@NorthLeft12: Well if we follow the Republican Plan for “prosperity” and go back to the gold standard, not many will want to come here anyway.
gex
@tsquared2001: well, I think getting rid of the whole media consolidation thing was our signal that this is a business, like any other. let it get dominated by a few corporations and let it drown out other voices and perspectives. Better yet, let’s go all in on the infotainment model. Why should a news department be a loss leader when it can be TMZ for ugly people?
boatboy_srq
@trollhattan: Never been to Chicago or San Francisco, have you?
boatboy_srq
@Pogonip: Why hire the thugs, when there are plenty of angry militiamen who’ll pay for the
letters of marquecommissions?Betty Cracker
@max: I haven’t been so naïve as to believe that. I just figured the money people who actually run things want to win and would eventually rain brimstone on the obvious losers so they’ll go away. It has always been thus. But maybe not this year.
Germy Shoemangler
@boatboy_srq: A few years back Carl Paladino ran for NY governor:
Germy Shoemangler
@schrodinger’s cat:
Problem solved! Who said republicans can’t govern?
tsquared2001
@gex: That was EAXCTLY Katrina Vanden Heuvel’s point during that segment – that the line between policy and entertainment has been obliterated.
I just wish that the media would acknowledge that panem et circenses is all we are gonna get from now fucking on. Own your dickishness, MSM, own IT!
Germy Shoemangler
From BoingBoing
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
Maybe you should ask the surgeon whose hands were permanently damaged by LAPD if his money protected him from racism. Or the tennis player who was tackled by an undercover NYPD officer. Or the basketball player whose leg was broken by NYPD, was completely exonerated in court because they had video showing the NYPD was lying, and is now suing.
Ask all of those people if having money magically protected them from racism. They may be able to answer you after they stop laughing at your idiocy, but it’ll take a while.
LevelB
Maybe if we call the deportation force “Jade Helm” our friends on the right might hear what we are saying…
tsquared2001
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): FIRST comes the throat punch, THEN comes the laughter.
There IS a system to be followed
tsquared2001
@Germy Shoemangler: “As is often the case, the reactionary right isn’t pro-racism, it’s just depraved in its indifference to the racist outcomes of being pro-crony-capitalism.”
I am afraid I am going to have to disagree with Cathy O’Neil most vociferously. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. The whole point is racism – crony capitalism is just the side benefit.
Germy Shoemangler
@tsquared2001:
I agree.
A guy
Mnemosyne- I’m not talking bout those folks. And I’m not saying railroad kid hasn’t experienced some negative comments from others bout his color. I just want him to admit his privilege
Matt McIrvin
@A guy: Jimmy Carter? Dude, Barack Obama has vastly stepped up border enforcement. (And immigration from Mexico is close to nil these days; what we’re seeing now is mostly immigration from Central America through Mexico, but overall rates are way down from the 1990s and early 2000s.)
It doesn’t matter to the Republicans; what they’re talking about is not reality, it’s a paranoid fantasy of Obama somehow opening the borders to a wave of malign foreigners.
tsquared2001
@Germy Shoemangler: A bit shocked to see Minnesota representatives Paulsen and Emmer are co-sponsors of House Bill HR1737 and NOT my guy Keith Ellison.
Off to the email machine.
tsquared2001
@A guy: You have upped your troll game to the stratosphere. Yes, despite being called every racist term in the book, black railroad executive kid needs to acknowledge HIS privilege.
I am giggling SO hard right now.
gene108
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I think a lot of the public just does not want to be informed. It’s that simple. They have no problem, with the poor and the oppressed, as long as it is not them.
Kenneth Fair
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I love the folks who say we should build a wall. The US-Mexico border is 1900 miles long. Over 1200 miles of that length is the Texas-Mexico border, which is the Rio Grande River. How are you going to build a wall on a river? And if you build it next to the river, what are you going to do when the river floods, as it does from time to time?
This is just gargantuanly ignorant rhetoric.
HRA
My first attempt to “join the discussion” went into Retool and never came back. Take 2.
Unbelievable! I am sure a Black person will be spared from racial slurs by shouting “I am privileged.”
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Kenneth Fair: Not only that, but they’ve actually already built a fence/wall along parts of it. It doesn’t work so well…:
USA USA USA!!11
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
tsquared2001
@HRA: It DEFINITELY works. Just ask any lynched motherfucker.
Wait.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@A guy:
Look, we realize you’re upset to discover that some black people make more money than you, but you’re going to have to put on your big boy pants and realize they don’t owe you jack shit n
A guy
Rich railroad kid joined the hoax. The hoax furthered yesterday by the student body president tweeting out to stay inside cause the kkk was running wild on campus. A tweet he has deleted and apologized for, likely to avoid criminal charges for trying to start a riot. Hell I bet rich railroad kid sneaked a snickers or ramen noodle soup in on his hunger strike.
Bill Arnold
@schrodinger’s cat:
I have a co-worker who lives in a town in the Bronx called Woodlawn, where there are a lot of Irish undocumented immigrants, mostly people who overstayed their visas.
I lived in Putnam County NY for a while, and there were a lot of Polish undocumented immigrants (*). Heard stories occasionally of raids, where (Northern European) white people (men) would be running through the woods to elude capture. There were also plenty of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans but they were more obvious due to complexion.
(*) Mostly carpenters.
Villago Delenda Est
@Pogonip: The logistics of mass deportations, even if not done in a humane fashion, are formidable. As is the notion of mass confiscation of firearms. Both are physical impossibilities unless your willing to spend billions to pull them off. This is where both GOP notions of “what needs to be done” and “what Obama is going to do” are utterly ludicrous, but that doesn’t deter the scum who believe both are possible.
PurpleGirl
@Germy Shoemangler: I really didn’t like Andrew Cuomo but there was no way I would vote for Paladino, no way in hell.
Shana
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Holy crap! You love Hamilton and PG Wodehouse? You are definitely my new best friend. I threw out may back a couple of weeks ago (all better now) so I couldn’t go to Seattle for the every other year Wodehouse Society convention. It’s the first one I’ve missed in close to 20 years. Very bummed.
ETA: 2017 convention is in DC. I’ll be helping to put it together.
Matt
The part that *really* gets the fundies’ pants tight is imagining what they can do with that “deportation force” once the main job is done. Nothing as handy as a pre-vetted battalion of millions of conservative bully-boys when you want to form your own “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” to hammer-smash everybody who isn’t fearing Jeebus enough.
PurpleGirl
@Bill Arnold: The Greenpoint section of Brooklyn has a largely Polish population and many are people who have overstayed their visas.
ETA: The Polish Pope (spacing his name right now) even made a visit to one of the main RC churches there.
Heliopause
@Pogonip:
History shows us that deporting 11 million people spread over a large continent is certainly logistically possible, and the US certainly has the resources to accomplish it if the political will exists. Luckily, the political will does not exist (I think). In the highly unlikely event of a Trump victory next November, though, I’ll re-evaluate.
Villago Delenda Est
@PurpleGirl: John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła. Wikipedia can be your friend.
Prescott Cactus
Noooooooooooobody expects the Spanish Deportation ! ! !
M. Python
Paul in KY
And this force will have classy black uniforms, with twins ‘Ts’ on the collar, sorta shaped like lightning bolts…
Paul in KY
@schrodinger’s cat: Thanks for link. Glad to see that election outcome.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Should have known you’d be all over this! Baud 2016!
Paul in KY
@Snarkworth: They will be resettled in the East….