Friday, February 17, 2017

Update: White House Denies Plan to Militarize Raids—Do We Believe It?

“That is 100% not true. It is false,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told the media pool aboard Air Force One today, the Associated Press says in an update to an earlier report that the administration is considering a plan to employ up to 100,000 National Guard troops in sweeps of unauthorized immigrants. “There is no effort at all to round up, to utilize the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants,” Spicer went on, but “he couldn’t deny altogether that the subject had ever been discussed in the administration,” according to AP.

Later in the morning a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Vox that the memo was an early draft that was never “seriously considered.” Vox also published the full text of the memo, which Vox reporter Dara Lind said was “still under consideration in some form.”

It’s worth noting that the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces immigration laws, is now headed by retired general John Kelly. It could be significant that the last general to head the immigration enforcement apparatus was Joseph Swing, the architect of “Operation Wetback.”

Is Trump planning a rerun of "Operation Wetback"?

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