A president who likes to build fear

Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles

Trump just wants to instill fear and garner more media attention, reports the LA Times.  

Only 0.2% of the one million immigrants with deportation orders will be picked up in his much-advertised sweep to begin Sunday--maybe.

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-planned-immigration-raids-20190711-story.html

Yuk.  He can never get enough attention.

But one needlessly deported family member is too much.

Faithful activists around the country and the world protested the deportations of non-criminals.  

In Los Angeles they gathered at ICE's Metropolitan Detention Center in the downtown area, near Union Station, where the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights had held a rally on June 23 after dt publicly threatened a sweep, which he then postponed.

During the June 23 demonstration, "Detainees could be heard rapping on windows from the building above," reported Jade Hernandez on KABC's Eyewitness News.  

Protesters gathered on a side of the detention center where buses come in and out of the facility. Detainees could be heard rapping on windows from the building above, so protesters chanted their support.

My friend in Michigan attended a rally last night at the Federal Building in Ann Arbor, chanting "Close the camps" and singing "Blowin' in the Wind."  

They also held a candle light march, but Ann Arbor's latitude is 42 degrees north, so at 9:05 pm it still wasn't dark yet.

Thank you to Cindy Carcamo and Andrea Castillo for the LA Times report, which points out that dt used Twitter to threaten a sweep on June 17 and then cancelled it.

Louis DeSipio, a political science professor at UC Irvine, said it’s difficult to know whether the planned raids actually will happen this time. If they don’t, it may backfire on Trump.

“The president is skilled in the art of distraction,” he said. “But there is a cost in that each time he cancels it, he disrupts his relationship with ICE because they have to put a lot of effort into preparing for these things.”

It's also important to note that President Obama deported more immigrants than 45 has done.

Despite his aggressive rhetoric, Trump’s overall removal numbers during his first two years in office pale in comparison with those of the previous administration. Trump’s administration is on track to remove only about 8% more foreigners in fiscal year 2019 than President Obama’s last year in office, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data.

During the height of deportations under Obama in 2012, immigration officials removed 409,849 foreigners. By comparison, peak removals under Trump came last year, with 256,085.