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To: Brumar89 who wrote (1153457)	7/30/2019 2:03:11 PM
From: Brumar89	1 Recommendation Recommended By rdkflorida2 Respond to of 1573898

Why Does No One Care That Trump Is Lying About Elijah Cummings’ District? by JONATHAN V. LAST JULY 30, 2019 10:02 AM (Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock) 1. He’s Lying, Again There’s a great deal to unpack in the Trump-Elijah Cummings-Baltimore incident. So let’s start with the fact that Cummings has been a pretty great colleague to his Republican friends in the House. He’s the kind of old-school member who takes the idea that “we’re all friends here” seriously. Then there’s the racism. (You should read Andrew Egger’s piece on this.) But buried deep down in all of this is the question of truth. Here is what Trump said about Cummings and Maryland’s 7th district: Rep, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA….. ….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place . . . Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately! So here is my question: Exactly who says that Maryland’s 7th district is “considered the Worst in the USA” and “considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.” Let’s have some citations here. Heck, let’s just have one citation. I’ll save you the trouble, because there aren’t any. Because exactly nobody—nobody, anywhere in the world—considers Maryland’s 7th district “the Worst in the USA” or “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States.” Nobody. This statement by the president is a lie. When I say it’s a lie, I say this because Trump is not simply saying that Maryland’s 7th district is the worst. That would just be his opinion. It would be an incorrect opinion (we’ll get to that in a minute) but it wouldn’t be a lie. But by saying that it “is considered” the worst, most dangerous, etc. Trump is claiming that some mass of popular opinion and thought—not just him, Donald Trump—holds these views. And this is not true. It is a lie. The president of the United States is lying to you. And he is lying in an attempt to disparage and denigrate America. (Kind of makes you want to tell him to love or leave it, doesn’t it?) So let’s get to the opinion part. Why is it that nobody considers the Maryland 7th district “the Worst in the USA” or “the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States”? Because by every objective measure it is not even close. Here are some things you may or may not know about Maryland’s 7th district: It includes Johns Hopkins University, Johns Hopkins Hospital (which is one of the two or three best medical centers in the world), and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.It stretches as far west as Mount Airy.This western part of the district is essentially farmland.The median household income in the United States is $59,000. The median household income in MD-7 is $61,000.11 percent of district residents are foreign-born (compared to 13.5 percent for the U.S.).In educational attainment, MD-7 is right around the national average: 88.8 percent high school graduate and 38 percent a bachelor’s degree or higher.The majority of workers in MD-7 are white collar though there is a sizable blue-collar working class.You can find all of this and more from the Census, here. If you wanted to rank congressional districts by markers that might suggest they are the “worst” there are people who do that. Take this list of districts by median household income. (NY-15 is dead last, with a median income less than half that of MD-7.) There are rankings for districts by life expectancy (last is Kentucky’s 5th district) and educational attainment (last is Texas’ 29th district). My point is that to believe that Maryland’s 7th district is “the worst” you have to know basically nothing about American life. Because not only is it not “technically” the “worst,” it’s not even close. By every conceivable measure, MD-7 is on the high side of average. Does it matter that the president of the United States doesn’t know any of this? Does it matter that he’s lying when he says that other people agree with his incorrect opinion? Does it matter that the man who two weeks ago said that people who are critical of America ought to go back to where they came from is now lying about America in an attempt to criticize it? Don’t get me wrong. The race-based aspect of this incident is bad. Very bad. But I can’t help thinking that the fact that everyone just assumes that Trump is lying about the underlying facts and that this lie is baked into the cake is even worse. thebulwark.com

To: Brumar89 who wrote (1153457)

7/30/2019 2:17:49 PM

From: Brumar89

1 Recommendation

Recommended By
rdkflorida2

Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1573898

ICE wrongfully detained nearly 1,500 Americans: report
By Chris Perez

April 27, 2018 | 6:57pm | Updated

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are arresting US citizens by mistake and holding them at detention centers for months — sometimes even years — without having any solid evidence against them, a report says.

Since 2012, the Los Angeles Times has found that more than 1,480 Americans have been released from ICE custody following an investigation of their citizenship claims.

The newspaper uncovered the data during a recent review of federal lawsuits, internal ICE documents and interviews with immigration attorneys.

Agency figures show that hundreds of US citizens have been accidentally thrown behind bars over the years — with agents basing their arrests on “incomplete government records, bad data and lax investigations,” the Times says.

Immigration lawyers told the paper that they’ve uncovered countless cases in federal court involving citizenship claims. They said that several people have been forced to spend months and sometimes years locked up as they attempt to prove they are American.

According to the Times, the most widely mistaken groups of people are children of immigrants and citizens born outside the US.

ICE agents have also been known to arrest individuals repeatedly in the past because the government failed to update their records, the paper reports.

“You feel like your rights are stripped from you,” explained Davino Watson, a Jamaican native from New York who was wrongfully held for more than three years.

“You feel hopeless.”

Watson had been serving time in a state prison for selling drugs when ICE found him and took him in for questioning, the Times reports.

He told agents that he was a US citizen via his father, who had naturalized. But that didn’t do him any good.

The person put in charge of finding Watson’s dad wound up botching the search results — by selecting the wrong name. He got transferred to an ICE detention center in Alabama and was wrongfully held there for three and a half years.

“It was very hard to understand,” Watson said. “I spent many nights crying.”

The Times spoke to several other citizens who were mistakenly held over the years, including a Rhode Island housekeeper who was detained twice — and a California landscaper who got snatched up by a Homeland Security agent while standing in a Home Depot parking lot.

“You’re making a big mistake,” Sergio Carrillo recalled telling the agent after getting handcuffed and tossed in the back of a squad car.

“I am a US citizen,” he said.

The man’s mother had moved to California from Mexico when he was a child, granting him automatic citizenship. But Carrillo claims ICE agents repeatedly ignored his claims and refused to follow up on them.

He was later taken to a federal facility in the Mojave Desert, where he spent four days locked up — despite there being no evidence against him, according to the Times.

“Inmates were telling me, ‘You’re not going to see a judge for weeks. In here, you don’t have any rights,’” Carrillo remembered. “I started getting real scared: How long was I going to be in here? How could this be happening?”

The landscaper said he lost several clients as a result of the detention. He later sued for false imprisonment and netted a $20,000 settlement, though ICE never admitted to any wrongdoing.

In response to the Times review, ICE officials released a statement saying: “US Immigration and Customs Enforcement takes very seriously any and all assertions that an individual detained in its custody may be a US citizen.”

Matthew Albence, the head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told the paper that the agency tries to update records when errors are discovered, but Carrillo feels that isn’t enough.

“For ICE, it’s like, ‘Oops, we made a mistake,’” he said. “But for me on the other end, it tears up your life.”

nypost.com