Monsters

It's another day in Trump's America—and another day to stand up for what's right. Get the facts to fight back.

How many children have been cruelly separated from their parents and families? How many children are lost? The Trump administration doesn’t know how many thousands of children they deliberately traumatized for the sake of “deterring” other asylum seekers, and we may never know.

The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an appalling report confirming that perhaps thousands more children than previously thought were taken from their parents.

Here’s what we do know:

  • We don’t know how many minors are separated (some of them permanently) from their families—only that there are many more than 2,700.
  • Why doesn’t the administration know the exact number of kids they ripped from their parents’ arms? Because Trump’s government didn’t bother to design a system to track these separated families.
  • President Trump and his appointees even “weighed speeding up the deportation of migrant children by denying them their legal right to asylum hearings after separating them from their parents.”
  • Two other young immigrant children who were in Border Patrol custody are dead, and Trump used their deaths as arguments for a border wall after the shutdown began.

This is a national disgrace and a permanent stain on this country.

THE PATTERN OF OBSTRUCTION GROWS.

For more than two years, Trump has been engaged in an almost constant pattern of obstructing the many investigations into him.

It’s a federal crime to incite someone to commit perjury. According to BuzzFeed News (who reportedly sourced it from two federal law enforcement officials), that’s exactly what Trump did.

If it’s true that Trump knowingly instructed his former attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress, then the president committed a federal crime. Additionally—if true—it’s reminiscent of the charges for which Presidents Nixon and Clinton faced articles of impeachment.

Trump’s own Attorney General pick, William Barr, said this week that a president persuading a person to commit perjury or convincing a witness to change their testimony would be obstruction of justice.

OFF-KILTER: RAISE THE WAGE.

The Off-Kilter team breaks down the minimum wage as House Democrats renew their push for $15. Plus, Indivisible’s Chad Bolt is back with the news of the week. Listen to the episode here.

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