While having the leaders of the three small Baltic republics as a captive audience most of Tuesday at the White House, the president* spent a lot of time thumping his own tub on the issue of immigration, about which he knows perilously little, but that’s never stopped him before.

We heard how he’d muscled the Mexicans into breaking up the “caravan” of impoverished Hondurans who were headed this way, a peregrination that began as an annual protest against how the Mexicans shake down the desperate folks coming north and one that, in any case, is presently stalled in a Mexican soccer field.

The president*, of course, has managed to turn this into the imminent arrival of Sardaukar terror troops in Lubbock. From The Washington Post:

Trump’s comments have turned what had been an annual march of U.S.-bound migrants—an event aimed at highlighting the suffering of Central Americans fleeing home — into something of a political crisis for Mexico… On Monday, Mexican immigration officials began to register the hundreds of migrants and talked about the possibility of humanitarian visas for the most vulnerable, while others might receive permits of less than a month. Some already have been deported, according to Mexican officials. While the march wasn’t unprecedented, this year’s exercise drew an unusually large number of participants. Conservative U.S. media outlets jumped on reports of the march, depicting it as a sign of the threat of illegal migration to the United States. In fact, U.S. border authorities reported a 26 percent decline in the number of people detained or stopped at the southern border in 2017 compared with the previous year.

Meanwhile, on this side of the border, the horror of our present immigration policy grows steadily more grotesque. From a great piece in New York by Hannah Dreier, we learn about Henry, who fled to this country to escape his involvement in MS-13, a gang that sprang up in El Salvador when a number of Salvadorans were sent back there from Los Angeles, and which the president* likes to cite as an occupying power in some American cities. MS-13 is indeed a particularly vicious bunch of cutthroats and, once he got to Long Island, Henry went to the FBI and became a vital source at rolling up the gang on Long Island.

Henry’s cooperation was a coup for law enforcement. MS-13 was in the midst of a convulsion of violence that claimed 25 lives in Long Island over the past two years. President Trump had seized on MS-13 as a symbol of the dangers of immigration, referring to parts of Long Island as “bloodstained killing fields.” Police were desperately looking for informants who could help them crack how the gang worked and make arrests. Henry gave them a way in. Under normal circumstances, Henry’s choice would have been his salvation. By working with the police, he could have escaped the gang and started fresh. But not in the dawning of the Trump era, when every immigrant has become a target and local police in towns like Brentwood have become willing agents in a nationwide campaign of detention and deportation. Without knowing it, Henry had picked the wrong moment to help the authorities.

Nice to see you again, Mr. Kafka. Your usual table?

Now that he had helped the police, Henry assumed his witness-protection papers would be coming through any day. When he turned 18, he started telling friends and teachers he trusted that he would soon disappear to California. Then one morning in August, as Henry was making lunch for his shift at the toilet-paper factory, the federales finally came for him. But they weren’t from the FBI or the witness-protection program. They were from ICE. The same unit that Henry had helped to arrest members of MS-13 was now pursuing a deportation case against him, using the information he had provided as evidence… He watched the Long Island streets he knew disappear, replaced by the high-rises of downtown Manhattan, then darkness as the bus was swallowed by a tunnel to New Jersey. He was headed to an ICE detention center full of young men suspected of being MS-13 members — the very same ones he had snitched on.

Good God.

In Texas, the burlesque is slightly less garish, but no less mindless. From The San Antonio Express-News:

Last month, immigrant rights groups reported that the men were physically and verbally abused at a detention center in Sierra Blanca, near El Paso. In phone interviews and conference calls with reporters, several of the men described beatings and indiscriminate use of pepper spray at the West Texas Detention Center, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections under a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The men were interviewed by officials from ICE’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility, said Fatma Marouf, a law professor and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Texas A&M University. But by deporting the men, ICE may have hamstrung its own internal investigation as well as any criminal investigation that might have been conducted by the Justice Department, Marouf said.

LaSalle has not responded to requests for comment. ICE officials wouldn’t address allegations that the deportations affected their investigation into treatment of detainees at the West Texas Detention Center. An agency spokeswoman said Monday that ICE “field office personnel conduct records checks prior to removal to ensure that aliens are free from any legal impediment to removal. Accordingly, the aliens aboard the March 29 flight were all subject to administratively final orders of removal.” One of the men deported said by phone that immigrants held in a processing center in El Paso were loaded onto a plane Thursday and released in Somalia’s capital of Mogadishu on Friday.

Job One, if the Congress changes hands in the elections next fall, is an intensive investigation of ICE, which has turned into the most brutal kind of national police force. Help the FBI, get locked up with the guys you gave up. Complain about being brutalized while in ICE’s custody, get sent back to the one place in the world you most do not want to go. This kind of activity is positively Soviet in its bureaucratic brainlessness. We only learn from the best.

And, in the face of this, the president* is prepared to dance all over the Posse Comitatus Act and send the military to police the border until his stupid wall is finished, which will be never. He can get around posse comitatus by using National Guard units, but an open-ended deployment of the Guard until the wall that never will be built gets finished would just be another layer of madness, and we should be used to that by now.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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