On 60 Minutes, Tom Homan said “families can be deported together.” That would require removing Americans too.
[…] Removing one million people from the country a year would cost an estimated $88 billion annually, according to the American Immigration Council.
Still, Trump’s potential second administration wants to try again, even if it appears they only have concepts of a plan for how to do carry out mass removal […]
On Sunday, Tom Homan, the one-time cop and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, appeared on 60 Minutes to sell the plan as not potentially catastrophic. Homan, the “architect” of family separation who said he didn’t “give a shit” about being sued over the infamous practice, has been defiantly positioning himself as the man to get the job done.
“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he said at the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, in July. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
But when asked by CBS’s Cecilia Vega how feasible—or humane—the rollout of a mass deportation proposal would be, his answers inspired little confidence. [video at the link]
[…]
To detain immigrants before carrying out their deportations, Miller said the Trump administration would build massive holding facilities that could accommodate between 50,000 to 70,000 people at any given time. Such an undertaking, he said, “would be greater than any national infrastructure project we’ve done to date.”
In an exercise of semantics, Homan went on to say he doesn’t use the term “raids,” but that “worksite enforcement operations” would be necessary. When Vega pressed him on how the agency would prioritize immigration enforcement against national security and public safety threats, he left no room for doubt that anyone would entered the United States unlawfully would be a potential target. “So you’re carrying out a targeted enforcement operation,” Vega said, “grandma is in the house. She’s undocumented. She gets arrested too?”
“It depends,” Homan said. “Let the [immigration] judges decide. […]
And as immigration experts have noted, such a plan would negatively impact mixed-status households, potentially tearing families apart. To that, Homan offered an alternative. “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Vega asked. “Of course there is,” Homan said. “Families can be deported together.”
This is the space where I normally write pithy comments about JD Vance’s stupid appearances on the Sunday shows. But as fate would have it, I am spared one horror to address another. As Wonkette’s resident Puerto Rican writer, there are some things that I am uniquely suited for.
So, let’s address one of the “highlights” of Donald Trump’s Nazi Madison Square Garden rally remake: “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe.
The “joke” for posterity:
HINCHCLIFFE: It is absolutely wild times. It really, really is. Don’t know if you guys know this. There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.
It wasn’t the only racist “joke” Hinchcliffe said during his set, in case some want to claim this was a singular moment.
HINCHCLIFFE: These Latinos they love making babies, too. Just know that. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside…just like they did to our country.
And:
HINCHCLIFFE: It’s a cool Black guy with a thing on his head. What the hell is that? A lampshade? Look at this guy! Oh my goodness … wow. I’m just kidding. That’s one of my buddies. He had a Halloween party last night. We had fun. We carved watermelons together.
For those not terminally online and unfamiliar with Tony Hinchcliffe, he hosts a podcast called “Kill Tony.”
Actual comedian Katt Williams contextualized who Hinchcliffe is on his infamous “Club Shay Shay” appearance with Shannon Sharpe, noting that he’s one of “six comedians that never been funny” that Joe Rogan likes to promote. Hinchcliffe is a meteor of mediocrity orbiting around the moon of failing upwards that is Rogan. His “career” is basically kissing Rogan’s ass and making low effort “I’m the victim of ‘Cancel Culture’ comedy” specials.
In 2021, Tony Hinchcliffe got “canceled” for this “joke”. [video at the link: “Filthy little fucking Chink […]” and more]
But as anyone with any understanding of white supremacy and history can guess, Hinchcliffe was not only not “canceled” but rewarded for his overt racism. He admitted as much months ago. [video at the link]
There is always an eager audience for people who cater to hate and racism. Clearly, Trump has made it his whole political career and specifically chose to mirror the 1939 Nazi Madison Square Garden Rally as his magnum opus. His apartheid minister of miscommunication got the hint and signaled to his online white supremacists that very meaning prior to the rally. [X post from Elon Musk is available at the link]
In response to Hinchcliffe’s “joke,” Republicans vacillated between glee … [examples at the link]
… and panic for those in states with large population of Puerto Ricans like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia and Florida, that HAVE YET TO VOTE! Florida politicians are especially freaking out: [examples at the link]
Puerto Rico’s sole non-voting member of Congress (thanks, colonialism!), Jenniffer González-Colón, also issued a statement, while trying to wash out the stain of being a Republican who has endorsed Trump and his party of hate. [X post at the link]
The Trump campaign also quickly rushed out a statement attributed to campaign adviser Daniella Alvarez, saying the “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.” Clearly they hoped that would cover the massive shit they took on Puerto Rican people.
Hinchcliffe, for his part, seems to be using the old “it was a joke” defense that racists use as a shield when called on their bullshit. Governor Tim Walz and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez happened to be live together last night and reacted in real time. It’s worth watching.
Hinchcliffe reacted to that: [X post at the link]
Few things:
– It wasn’t taken out of context.
– Being racist toward other ethnicities doesn’t make it any better. Being an “equal opportunity” bigot doesn’t change or make a person less of a bigot.
– Hinchcliffe has spoken about his connections to the mob and Italian food on podcasts, which reminds me of how he’s a textbook example of the nebulousness of being “white.” Not very long ago, it was his very ancestors who were seen as “floating garbage” as they arrived on Ellis Island, New York, seeking a better life for their children. And now he gets to spew this shit before massive crowds of racists while Santa Monica fascist Stephen Miller declares that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
– Hinchcliffe may want to seek an alternate future vacation spot. From now until, say, the heat death of the universe.
I’ll conclude with this clip of comedian Anthony Jeselnik, no stranger to dark comedy and roasts, basically summarizing why Tony Hinchcliffe’s “comedic art” failed. [video at the link]
JESELNIK: There’s this quote attributed to Andy Warhol that I love: “Art is getting away with it.” You know if you put out a special and everyone’s pissed, you didn’t get away with it. You need to make everyone laugh […] otherwise you’re just a troll.
Judging by the deafening silence, even from Trump’s MAGA Nazi audience, Hinchcliffe’s joke failed. [True!]
I hope my fellow Boricuas everywhere show Hinchcliffe, Trump and the Republican Party just how much they didn’t get away with it at the polls on November 5.
On Sunday, vice presidential candidate and fuckwit JD Vance sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper for an interview on a range of topics, including Vance’s outlook on the state of America, his goals for his potential vice presidency, and his dreams and aspirations for the future of his children, your children, and the nation he hopes to lead.
Ha ha, we kid. Mostly we learned what we already knew, which is that JD Vance is […] a narrow-minded, arrogant cretin who is in way, way, way over his head. For 17 minutes he sneered at and insulted anyone who thinks Donald Trump is unfit to be president, he deflected Tapper’s questions, he was belligerent, and he twisted himself into knots trying to make Trump sound like the only sane person in a government awash in incompetent haters who are just jealous of Trump’s general awesomeness.
All credit to Jake Tapper, though. He managed to get nearly two full minutes into his interview with Senator Butthair before he made this face: [Image at the link]
That was right after Vance accused former Marine general and Trump chief of staff John Kelly of being a war-monger who wants to get America involved in “a ton of ridiculous military conflicts,” and Tapper said essentially, My dude, he lost his own son in Afghanistan and I’ve never heard him actually advocate for expanding that war or really express any opinion of that particular conflict at all, are you sure you want to talk about him like he’s Robert Duvall in The Great Santini?
It did not get better from there, as Vance continued talking up Trump as the peace candidate and accusing neocons of calling him a dictator because they were mad he wouldn’t take their advice and bomb Iran or something.
Then he accused Kelly of coordinating with the Kamala Harris campaign before he started giving interviews calling Trump a danger to the country:
TAPPER: You said the other day — quote — “I guarantee John Kelly talked to somebody on Kamala Harris’s campaign beforehand,” before he did this interview. Now, I’ve spoken with people in John Kelly’s circle and I’ve spoken with people in the Kamala Harris campaign. They say there’s been no communication the entire time. So where did that come from?
VANCE: Oh, I’m highly skeptical of that, Jake. You know the way that these attacks work. You know the way that these people are often vetted by a campaign before something goes out there.
TAPPER: So you made it up?
[…] Ahem, yes. He made it up, as immediately became obvious:
VANCE: If it is true that he never spoke with anyone in Kamala Harris’s orbit, I’m happy to apologize to John Kelly for misstating how he delivered this news to ‘The Atlantic’ magazine. But let’s talk about who — who did he deliver this news to? To Jeffrey Goldberg, a guy who lied the United States into the Iraq war, which led to the deaths of millions of innocent Arabs and thousands of innocent Americans. You don’t go to that guy if you don’t have a particular ideological motive. I think that’s what’s going on. If I’m wrong, I’m happy to say that I’m wrong.
That’s a neat trick, because it puts the entire onus on John Kelly to prove a negative. That’s why he can so generously say he’ll admit he’s wrong, because there is no way to definitely prove what happened one way or the other.
It went on and on like that, with Tapper bringing up specific threats Trump has made — using the military on American protestors, deporting Special Counsel Jack Smith, putting Liz Cheney in front of a war tribunal. All this left Vance in the position of having to defend the indefensible, which he didn’t really want to do because A) he wants to be one 78-year-old heartbeat away from the world’s most powerful office, and B) because he genuinely agrees with all these dumbass accusations and threats.
TAPPER: None of that sounds fascist to you at all?
VANCE: No, of course it doesn’t.
TAPPER: Putting Liz Cheney before a military tribunal?
VANCE: First of all, I don’t buy into the premise of what you’re saying, Jake.
TAPPER: These are things he said. These are things he said.
[…] There is a lot more, which you can watch here if you have 17 minutes and no more will to live: [video at the link]
We specifically recommend the exchange around the 15-minute mark, when Vance again accuses former Trump administration officials of simply being disgruntled employees who couldn’t get the boss to start a bajillion wars, and Jake Tapper responds, with a level of incredulity normally reserved for movie actors looking up at the fleet of city-sized UFOs that have suddenly appeared in the skies overhead, “That’s really your argument???”
Yes, it is JD Vance’s argument. Because — and we can’t stress this enough — he is a soulless pile of […] naked ambition […]
U.S. intelligence agencies have identified domestic extremists with grievances rooted in election-related conspiracy theories, including beliefs in widespread voter fraud and animosity toward perceived political opponents, as the most likely threat of violence in the coming election.
In a Joint Intelligence Bulletin that was not distributed publicly but was reviewed by NBC News, agents from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security warn state and local law enforcement agencies that domestic violent extremists seeking to terrorize and disrupt the vote are a threat to the election and throughout Inauguration Day.
The report identified the potential targets as candidates, elected officials, election workers, members of the media and judges involved in election cases. The potential threats include physical attacks and violence at polling places, ballot drop boxes, voter registration locations and rallies and campaign events. […]
the reports “are not typical election threat intelligence,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People. “The documents are unmistakably a product of a radically heightened threat environment.” […]
The report noted recent incidents of targeted violence, including increased activity from white nationalists and Proud Boy organizing against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. It also noted disturbing calls for violence on anonymous online message boards targeting election workers and undocumented immigrants as part of “election steal defense prep.”
In the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread, microraptor noted that, “Two ballot drop boxes were firebombed in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington last night/early this morning.”
In the judicial equivalent of a Friday night news dump, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dropped a decision that paves the way for the next frontier in voter suppression. A three-judge panel of Trump appointees—James Ho, Kyle Duncan, and Andrew Oldham—gleefully tossed out one of the pillars of federalism in their zeal to help Republicans win elections whether people support them or not.
Mississippi has—well, had—a law that required the state to count absentee ballots received up to five days after Election Day if they were postmarked before or on the day of the election. The state made that change to its election laws during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they kept it on the books.
If you’re not brain-poisoned with right-wing propaganda about stolen elections, a law like this just makes sense. The person still has to have cast a ballot by Election Day. This way, their vote won’t be invalidated just because the United States Postal Service is somehow incapable of getting ballots to election centers within the three-to-five-day range they promise. Eighteen states—plus Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.—have laws like this.
These days, Republicans who have marinated in the Trump fever swamp of voter fraud allegations hate laws like this. They’re committed to their worldview that mail-in ballots are ripe for fraud because that’s what Trump thinks, despite evidence showing that voter fraud such as double voting is vanishingly small.
So, back to Mississippi. In early 2024, the Republican National Committee sued the state, saying that the counting of late-arriving ballots was preempted by federal statutes that require all votes to arrive by Election Day. Mississippi is an odd choice for Republicans to turn their voter fraud suspicions on, given Trump took 57% of the vote in both 2016 and 2020. But by suing in Mississippi, they were guaranteed to get their appeal in front of a Fifth Circuit panel if they lost at the lower court.
The Fifth Circuit is the most conservative appellate court in the country. […]
The Fifth Circuit has given us such bangers as: Bump Stocks are Great, Actually and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration Can’t Enforce Workplace Safety Rules Because COVID-19 is No Big Deal. The court is so off the rails that even the conservative majority at the United States Supreme Court has started ruling against them repeatedly. [Embedded links to sources are available at the main link.]
Getting repeatedly smacked down by the Supreme Court doesn’t seem to have cowed the Fifth Circuit at all. So why wouldn’t they, a mere eight days before the election, issue a decision that could wreak havoc in multiple states? […]
In ruling that Mississippi can’t make its own laws about absentee ballots, the Fifth Circuit wasn’t actually interested in meddling in Mississippi’s 2024 election as such because there’s no question that the state will go for Trump. That’s why the decision remanded the case back to the lower court without issuing an injunction that would have blocked the state from accepting late-arriving ballots in 2024. Rather, this is all about a far-right push to declare that Election Day is a singular day and limit voting to in-person on that day. [True. And that is a bonkers point that Trump has repeatedly made.]
In 2020, Democrats voted by mail at double the rate of Republicans. Early voting data for 2024 shows Republicans pulling nearly even, no doubt thanks to the GOP making a big mail-in voting push even while Trump runs around crying fraud about it. MAGA types won’t be happy until they’ve cut off all the ways in which voting could be made more accessible.
But first, they need to wrench the regulation of voting away from the states. The federal courts are stuffed to the gills with Federalist Society conservatives, and Republicans very much would rather have those judges in charge of elections than allow states to make their own rules. To do that, they need to flip the regulation of elections on its head.
As much as they’re supposed to be the states’ rights party, the GOP has very much embraced the notion that the federal courts get a veto over state election procedures whenever it suits them. It’s been a successful strategy for the right going back to Bush v. Gore, where the court’s conservative majority handed the election to George W. Bush by stopping Florida from using its own laws to recount votes.
Given that three GOP veterans of the Bush v. Gore battle now sit on the Supreme Court, why not lay the groundwork for that court to give GOP candidates a helping hand? Chief Justice John Roberts prepped the attorney who argued Bush v. Gore before the court, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett both worked on the Bush legal team.
Last term […] the Supreme Court invalidated Colorado’s removal of Trump from the ballot. In doing so, the court overruled the Colorado Supreme Court, essentially telling states that they cannot enforce their laws regarding ballot access. So, a state is not allowed to kick Trump off the ballot even if the state determined he was an insurrectionist and therefore not eligible.
Thanks to the Fifth Circuit, Republicans now have a decision in hand that says that federal law preempts state law when it comes to when absentee ballots can be counted. […] it would invalidate every state law that allows late-arriving votes to be counted, even if they were postmarked by Election Day. […] there’s no telling what the GOP will do with this late-October gift.
[snipped details of how the fallout could affect the counting of votes in Nevada]
And if that challenge makes it all the way to the Supreme Court? […] It’s a court custom-made to wrench the vote away from the people and give it to Donald Trump.
For the convenience of readers, here are a few links back to the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread:
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-2/#comment-2240644
Texas hospitals prepare to gather data on treating non-citizens
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-2/#comment-2240606
Virginia appeals court strikes down effort to purge suspected noncitizen voters
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-2/#comment-2240584
One of many comments discussing Trump’s racist rally at Madison Square Garden
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2024/10/04/infinite-thread-xxxiii/comment-page-2/#comment-2240669
More commentary on Trump’s racist rally.
Trump’s Former ICE Head’s Plan for Mass Deportation: More Family Separation or Deporting US Citizens
On 60 Minutes, Tom Homan said “families can be deported together.” That would require removing Americans too.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/from-all-puerto-ricans-fck-you-tony
https://www.wonkette.com/p/jake-tapper-kicks-jd-vances-smarmy
Jake Tapper Kicks JD Vance’s Smarmy, Lying Ass
Link
In the previous set of 500 comments on The Infinite Thread, microraptor noted that, “Two ballot drop boxes were firebombed in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington last night/early this morning.”
Voter suppression:
Link