The daughter of a Los Angeles man who was detained Sunday outside his home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents spoke out this week about his treatment and the immigration policies that appear to target longtime, law-abiding residents.

Jose Luis Garcia, 62, was watering his lawn and having his morning coffee outside his home in the Arleta neighborhood of San Fernando Valley when ICE agents put him in handcuffs and detained him, according to his daughter, Natalie Garcia.

The arrest came as a shock to the 32-year-old Garcia, who said that her father is a law-abiding, legal permanent resident who came to the United States nearly 50 years ago when he was 13 years old.

Michael Kaufman, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said the incident appears to fit a pattern under the Trump administration of detaining people with old, minor convictions.

“This is … a misdemeanor from two decades ago for which he’s completed his sentence,” Kaufman, who briefly spoke to Natalie Garcia but is not representing the family, said. “From what we know of this story, this is not an individual that presents a threat to anyone.”

Kaufman noted that the current administration no longer prioritizes targeting people with serious criminal convictions.

“It’s part of a pattern that we’ve seen of rounding up people who are longstanding members of our community who have family here and settled lives here and their lives are turned upside down because they may have committed some misdemeanor deep in their past,” Kaufman said.

Tero wrote:Now he is channeling the ghost of Reagan: Space Force (same as Star Wars)

aban57 wrote:My scenario for tomorrow's meeting.
Kim poisons Trump with a slow poison, and it's detected too late. Trump dies after he came back to the US. Kim claims he delivered the world from a lunatic, and plays the hero card.
The US is torn on what action to take. Trump supporters want to invade NK, but Kim threatens to nuke SK. The rest of the US, after a week-long celebration, decide to give a medal to Kim, while Pence takes over and starts turning the US into a theocracy. The disagreement with Iran turns into a religion war and most of Iran, Israel, Palestine and Saudi Arabia is turned to ashes. ISIS reborns from these ashes and achieves its primary goal, "the" califate.
The US becomes isolated and shunned, leaving China to become "the leader of the free world", ironically. Europe tries to compete, but is still unable to decide whethet it attacks the califate or not, and finally implodes.
The entire world speaks Chinese or English, and that's how Firefly begins.
THE END.

Robert Mueller won’t save us
Only Congress can decide if the president is above the law.
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/18/17433612/trump-mueller-congress-constitution-rule-of-law

Is the president of the United States above the law?

The question seems ridiculous on its face. But the reality of President Donald Trump forces it upon us. The president is doing things that many assumed could not, or would not, be done. He seems to believe, among other things, that he has total control over the federal law enforcement apparatus, that he has the right to pardon himself, that he cannot obstruct justice, and that he cannot be subpoenaed or indicted for any crimes he might commit.

As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong? In the meantime, the never ending Witch Hunt, led by 13 very Angry and Conflicted Democrats (& others) continues into the mid-terms!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2018
Some of this was contradicted more than a week ago, when White House press secretary Sarah Sanders dismissed questions about the president pardoning himself. “Thankfully, the president hasn’t done anything wrong and wouldn’t have any need for a pardon,” she said, adding that “no one is above the law.”

But let’s take the words of the president seriously. If he’s right — if he has absolute power to pardon himself from legal consequences for absolutely any wrongdoing — then we do not have a president; we have a monarch. And we are not, as John Adams once promised, “a government of laws, not of men.”

That might sound dramatic, but I don’t think it is. Consider the recent 20-page memo sent to Robert Mueller’s team from Trump’s lawyers. The document lays out a view of presidential power that is essentially boundless. It states that the president “could, if he wished, terminate” Mueller’s inquiry “or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired.” Later, Trump’s lawyers clarified that the president can fire the FBI director “at any time and for any reason,” including to shut down an inconvenient investigation.

Or take Trump’s recent demand that the Justice Department investigate whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign. The request is both unprecedented and preposterous, but it is not, as far as I can tell, illegal, even if the aim is to undercut an investigation into the president’s own campaign.

One of the many revelations in the past couple of years is that much of what we take for granted in our political system is the product of informal norms and not fixed laws. Baked into our politics is the quiet assumption that the elected leader of the country will be constrained by a sense of decency and a respect for basic liberal democratic customs, and that competition among the three branches of government will protect against deviant actors.

But what if partisanship renders Congress dysfunctional? What if the president doesn’t care about norms or customs? And what if the citizenry is so divided or cocooned or alienated that it can’t reliably pressure Congress to check an overreaching executive?

These are not new questions. When the country was founded, there were vigorous debates between supporters and opponents of the proposed Constitution. In papers, documents, and pamphlets, skeptics, known as Antifederalists, openly worried that a constitutional republic would leave us vulnerable to tyranny, and that human nature was too corruptible to trust with so much power. Now is a fine time to revisit their concerns.

Seabass wrote:

Seabass wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:I didn't appreciate the part where they cut off the CBS reporter, pretty sure they were saying they were uncomfortable with how the cages/pens/whatever were being characterized, not that they were physically uncomfortable. Let's leave the quote mining to Fox News, yeah?

Washington (CNN)Attorney General Jeff Sessions dismissed comparisons of the detention facilities for migrant children to Nazi concentration camps by arguing that Nazis "were keeping the Jews from leaving the country."

"Well, it's a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country," Sessions tried to explain during an interview Monday night with Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
Sessions later said if parents are deported, their children return to their home country with them. If the parents claim asylum and stay in the US, Sessions said, their children also stay but in Department of Health and Human Services' custody

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

SafeAsMilk wrote:I didn't appreciate the part where they cut off the CBS reporter, pretty sure they were saying they were uncomfortable with how the cages/pens/whatever were being characterized, not that they were physically uncomfortable. Let's leave the quote mining to Fox News, yeah?

The Daily Show did adress that.