Texas Governor Abbott is a Roman Catholic who is treating innocent migrants like they are animals in cages

Echo report published in The Independent, by Josh Marcus.

Buoys, razor wire, and a Trump-y wall: How Greg Abbott turned the Rio Grande into an immigration ‘war zone’.  Texas governor has funnelled $12bn into a military-style border buildup with floating walls and razor wire. 

Josh Marcus speaks with a local business owner and lifelong riverman who’s suing the state to stop it.

He may be suing the governor of Texas, but Jessie Fuentes isn’t really a political guy. His disagreement with Greg Abbott is personal. Continental, in a sense. Spiritual even.

Immigrants in the Rio Grande

On 7 July, Mr Fuentes, who owns a small kayaking business, sued the state for its decision to install a 1,000-foot buoy wall in the town of Eagle Pass, within a stretch of the Rio Grande river.

In Texas, the river forms the legal border between the US and Mexico. More than just a legal argument that a state politician doesn’t have jurisdiction over an international borderline, Mr Fuentes, who grew up along the Rio Grande, feels that Abbott has crossed a moral line. The governor, he says, is violating a river that nourishes ecosystems, people, and a vibrant trans-border culture that’s existed far longer and far more freely than the rolls of razor wire multiplying across the banks suggest.

“I’m not a politician. I just say listen, I love that river. Nobody speaks up for it. I’m speaking up for the river. Man, I have the right to try to prosper from my love of the river, that allows me the opportunity to get out there, to bring people to the river,” he told The Independent.

“They don’t live here. I do,” he added of Texas’s state leaders. “You’ve taken a beautiful waterway and you’ve converted it into a war zone.”

Mr Fuentes is part of a group of local residents, human rights activists, and international officials who are pushing back on the floating barrier project. They face challenging waters ahead, though.

Governor Abbott's evil floating border wall in the Rio Grande River

Governor Abbott is a shrewd operator. He has combined media savvy and audacious use of government funds and powers to secure billions of dollars and heaps of political capital for his notion of a military-style crackdown at the border. 

Abbott charged ahead with little resistance, even though governors and presidents have spent decades taking this iron-fisted approach with little empirical success to show for it.

In mid-July, state contractors were nearly complete installing the floating border barrier, a $1m, 1,000-foot pearl string of giant orange buoys with strong netting in between, anchored to the river floor.

Discussing the plan in June, Mr Abbott described the floating wall as a key part of his larger buildup at the border, which has featured mass deployment of as many as 10,000 state troopers and national guardsmen at a time, as well as razor wire and sections of a new border wall on private lands.

"When we’re dealing with 100 or 1,000 people, one of the goals is to slow down and deter as many of them as possible," said Abbott, on 8 June. "Some may eventually get to the border where they are going to face that multilayered razor wire and a full force of National Guard and DPS [Department of Public Safety] officers."

An estimated 250 people died crossing the Rio Grande last year, but Texas officials have nonetheless claimed that installing what amounts to a giant net in the river will “prevent the loss of life due to drownings.”

The barrier technology, like much of Abbott’s border agenda, is a retrofitted version of what the Trump administration was pursuing. 

In 2020, the Border Patrol advertised on Twitter, then quickly deleted, a post showing a demo of a floating barrier system from the same company that built Mr Abbott’s wall, Cochrane USA, only the Trump version had large black spikes that wouldn’t look out of place in a dungeon.

The Texas buoy plan dropped the spikes but kept the same controversy that Trump’s attempts to seal off the border attracted.

Last week, Mexico’s diplomat said the barrier plan may violate international treaties over the Rio Grande-based border, and said she will send an inspection team to investigate the buoy wall.

Migrant advocates say the buoys, like generations of border installations before them, won’t actually slow down immigration, but rather will push migrants towards ever more remote places to cross the border, increasing the likelihood they will face a perilous and potentially lethal crossing.

This strategy, known as “prevention through deterrence” has more or less been the explicit policy of the US government since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, a policy choice many on the ground say is causing unnecessary deaths.

“It’s been proven time after time that these so-called prevention through deterrence strategies don’t work,” Fernando García of the Border Network for Human Rights told The Independent. “They have not stopped immigration flows, but what they have done is they have put immigrants at risk.”

“It’s very likely that with [the floating buoy wall] they are looking for more remote and isolated places to come across so that whenever they are in danger by heat exhaustion, by drowning, they will not have anybody to help them,” he added, saying he worries it could be a record year for migrant deaths in the Rio Grande.

“All of this is death by policy.” 😈

According to leaks from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state’s border scheme, this policy includes intentionally putting migrants into harm’s way.

In a series of emails shared with news outlets including The Independent, a border medic described questioning orders from superiors to push exhausted migrants back into the river and to refrain from giving them water if captured.

“We were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning,” the trooper wrote.

The DPS source also claimed in the span of one week in late June, a teen mother was trapped in razor wire at the border while having a miscarriage, a 15-year-old broke his leg as he tried to find a way around the deterrence buoys, and a man lacerated his leg while trying to rescue his child from razor wire placed on a buoy.

Texas officials have defended the use of the razor wire while denying reports troopers were told to push people into the river.

“The Texas National Guard mission is to work alongside our Texas law enforcement partners to prevent, deter and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry,” the Texas Military Department told The Independent in response to news about the emails. “There is no order or directive instructing Service Members to push illegal immigrants back into the river or deny them drinking water.”

“Texas is deploying every tool and strategy to deter and repel illegal crossings between ports of entry as President Biden’s dangerous open border policies entice migrants from over 150 countries to risk their lives entering the country illegally,” a spokesperson for the governor told The Independent earlier this week.

The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment on this story from The Independent.

Beyond just putting migrants at risk, the border barriers are cutting into the deep cross-border cultural ties in the region, residents said.

Mr Fuentes, the business owner suing the state, said the locked-down border is only a recent historical development. His grandfather used to be able to casually ride into Mexico on a donkey to get supplies. He says that Texas politicians fomenting fear about immigration miss the fact that many who live along the US-Mexico border don’t feel the same way. The walls aren’t stopping some hypothetical invasion of immigrants. They’re dividing a community that’s older and bigger than boundaries on a map.

“That’s the beautiful thing about America,” he said. “We’ve got our culture on the border. The way it’s being misinterpreted right now, them saying we’re a war zone, things are out of control. We’re not that. We’re a community on the river. We get along with our neighbours.”

“I don’t think we’re under siege from an inflow of immigrants,” he added. “We’re under siege by law enforcement.”

When Mr Fuentes encounters migrants on the river, he offers them a blessing and any spare water if it he has it.

You wouldn’t know about these sorts of ties by watching the governor on TV. The Fox News regular frequently describes the situation in places like Eagle Pass as an “invasion” of drug-pushing cartel members, though drugs like fentanyl are overwhelmingly brought across the border by US citizens at official points of entry.

It’s not an accidental choice of words calling the situation an “invasion.” In November, the governor invoked a clause in the US Constitution allowing states to take military actions if they are under “invasion” to defend his policies, a theory legal scholars and critics say is both nonapplicable to immigration and an echo of the white-supremacist rhetoric that fueled incidents like the 2019 El Paso shooting, where 23 mostly Latino people were killed.

It may not be legally bulletproof, but it’s another savvy move from Abbott, (who is supposed to be a Roman Catholic!) who has proved (ambitiously) adept at using crises in recent years to further his border agenda.

The governor declared a state disaster at the US-Mexico border in 2021, freeing him up to use additional emergency powers, and used creative accounting to funnel an estimated $1bn in federal Covid relief funds to Operation Lone Star, the umbrella plan Mr Abbott has used to send troopers to the border and bus thousands of migrants out of Texas to liberal states.

Despite massive investments from the state and the federal government over decades from leaders of both parties, immigration levels at the US-Mexico border in late 2022 and 2023 are about the same as they were during their previous most recent peak around the year 2000.

A spokesperson for the governor’s office declined to answer specific questions from The Independent about the floating border barrier, and criticisms that it’s illegal and dangerous for migrants.

The governor’s office said Operation Lone Star had led to the apprehension of more than 393,000 unauthorised immigrants and the repelling of more than 49,000 illegal immigrants, as well as over 31,000 arrests, “all of which would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and our country thanks to President Biden’s open border policies,” according to spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris.

The Department of Justice is investigating Operation Lone Star for alleged civil rights abuses. Immigration is a concern of federal law, but thousands of immigrants have been arrested by state personnel for trespassing on private property, allegedly being held in jail for weeks without facing charges.

According to an investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and The Marshall Project, state officials were arresting far more trespassers than cartel members, and allegedly inflated data on Operation Lone Star by citing arrests on crimes like cockfighting, sexual assault, and stalking in their success statistics, even though these offences had no clear link to immigration enforcement.

Did Speaker Kevin McCarthy double cross the right wing Trumpists?

House Republicans are not interested in governing:

An echo opinion (with Maine Writer IMO), published in the Nevada Sun news.

It should surprise no one that, in today’s Washington D.C., a deal sometimes is not a deal. (IMO Rather, look out for the double cross!)

IMO Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot who suffers from Stormy Daniels Envy syndrome.

Especially when it involves the House Republicans, who seem more interested in scoring (IMO undemocratic!) political points with their supporters and justifying the former guy Donald Trump than in being serious legislators.

Their first victim was the second part of the bipartisan deal between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden that prevented a catastrophic government default.

The first part of their agreement, approved quickly by large majorities in both the House and Senate, extended the federal debt ceiling past the next election into 2025, ensuring the government wouldn’t default on its credit obligations.

But the second part, setting two-year parameters for curbing government spending to prevent a year-end governmental shutdown, had barely been passed when both Senate and House Republicans began to punch holes in it, reviving the prospect of the crisis that both leaders hoped to avoid.

Hawkish Senate Republicans, led by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Susan Collins of Maine, vowed to add funds to the $886 billion the agreement provided for defense, much of it to help embattled Ukraine. 

Being senators, that will probably prove negotiable.

More seriously, the same far-right House Republicans who opposed the original deal — and McCarthy’s speakership — said they’d oppose any funding bills that don’t cut overall spending by 2%, more than the debt ceiling bill specified. They took that stand knowing that Democratic control of the Senate would make it impossible to achieve.

Their demands — and the leverage they hold because of the GOP’s bare five-vote House margin — forced McCarthy and other GOP leaders to renege on the spending levels to which they had agreed.

As a result, the likelihood that the Biden-McCarthy agreement would prevent a government shutdown this fall has become an unlikelihood. Agreement on spending levels will probably prove impossible by the start of the new fiscal year October 1 — and possibly even by the end of 2023. (Ouch❗)

The underlying problem, of course, is that McCarthy, despite his success in helping pass the debt ceiling measure, again seems mainly able to control his fractious majority by acquiescing in such demands.

Indeed, events in the week before the House mercifully adjourned for a two-week “district work period” showed again that its de facto leader is not McCarthy, but Trump.

Someone is unduly influencing Ginni Thomas’: Expert says wife of Supreme Court justice is part of ‘Trump cult’

And Punchbowl News reported Monday that McCarthy plans to start impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland if House Republicans are dissatisfied with his handling of the Hunter Biden case. The common thread here is a Republican political effort to tar Biden and the Democrats — without evidence — with the same sorts of misdeeds for which Trump was impeached and now faces criminal charges.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right when she accused the Republicans of turning the House into a Trump-led “puppet show.”

The week also showed the contrast between McCarthy’s speakership and Pelosi’s. She too had to run the House with a tiny majority and faced occasional uprisings from her party’s fringe.

When her prospective speakership was imperiled at the outset, she adeptly picked off her opponents one by one until she had enough votes. When Texas Rep. Al Green prematurely sought to impeach Trump, she allowed a vote and made sure it was defeated.
McCarthy yielded to demands by foes of his speakership. As a result, (IMO, like a Charlie McCarthy puppet that's somehow come alive!), the Republican remains beholden to the GOP’s most extreme Trumpist elements, subject to a vote to topple his speakership, if he crosses (IMO in other words, "double-crosses!) them.

Polls, over the years, have shown that Republicans prefer officials who stand up for their principles, rather than compromisers. The result is the current House GOP majority.

Carl Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.

John Eastman is a fake news expert!

Echo report published in The New York Times by Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman.

The former guy Trump is "able to muddy the waters so thoroughly that democracy wilts on the vine", The Independent

John Eastman’s path from little-known academic to one of the most influential voices in Donald J. Trump’s ear in the final days of his presidency began in mid-2019, on Mr. Trump’s favorite platform: television.

Mr. Trump, who had never met Mr. Eastman, saw him on the Fox News talk show of the far-right commentator Mark Levin railing against the Russia investigation. Within two months, Mr. Eastman was sitting in the Oval Office for an hourlong meeting.

Soon, Mr. Eastman was meeting face to face at Mr. Trump’s urging with the attorney general, William P. Barr, and telling him how Mr. Trump could unilaterally impose limits on birthright citizenship.

Then, after the November election, Mr. Eastman wrote the memo for which he is now best known, laying out steps that Vice President Mike Pence could take to keep Mr. Trump in power — measures Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.

Mr. Eastman’s memo is among the most alarming of the continuing revelations about the last stages of Mr. Trump’s time in the White House, when he was prompting the Justice Department to find ways to reverse his loss in the election and his top general was worried about the nuclear chain of command.

Mr. Eastman’s rise within Mr. Trump’s inner circle in the chaotic final weeks of his administration also underscores the degree to which Mr. Trump not only relied on, but encouraged, a crew of players from the fringes of politics. They became key participants in his efforts to remain in power as many of his longtime aides and lawyers refused to help him.

John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, said in an interview that it was troubling that at such a critical juncture, Mr. Trump had pushed aside the Justice Department and White House counsel.

Instead, he said, Mr. Trump was listening to an outsider “without the institutional learning that has gone on for a couple of hundred years that undergirds the advice that is normally given to presidents that keep them in sane channels.”

Mr. Eastman’s appeal to Mr. Trump, fleshed out in interviews with Mr. Eastman and others who dealt with him during this period, rested in large part on his expansive views of presidential power — and his willingness to tell Mr. Trump what he wanted to hear.

When it came to immigration policy, a favorite topic of both men, Mr. Eastman argued that Mr. Trump could use his executive authority to impose limits on birthright citizenship — the foundational concept that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen — by saying it should not be applied to people born in the United States to noncitizens.

But Mr. Barr, who was increasingly finding himself having to fend off the advice of outside lawyers, television commentators and Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, dismissed the idea, saying Mr. Eastman’s argument was a stretch and ultimately impractical.

Mr. Eastman admitted Mr. Barr was right.

“Well, tell that to the president,” Mr. Barr told him.

Still, by early January 2021, amid his wide-ranging effort to overturn the election results, Mr. Trump had become so enamored of Mr. Eastman’s advice that the two teamed up in an Oval Office meeting to pressure Mr. Pence to intervene to help Mr. Trump remain in power by delaying the Jan. 6 certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

In a two-page memo written by Mr. Eastman that had been circulated to the White House in the days before the certification — revealed in the new book “Peril”, by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa — Mr. Eastman said that Mr. Pence as vice president was “the ultimate arbiter” of the election, essentially saying he had the power to determine who won, and that “we should take all of our actions with that in mind.”

As Mr. Trump hints at another run in 2024, Mr. Eastman remains a bridge between the former president and the continuing efforts by some of his supporters to promote specious allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 and to undercut faith in the electoral system.

In a series of interviews, Mr. Eastman said he was continuing to investigate reports of election fraud and was writing a book on the subject. He also said he would still like to represent Mr. Trump, who faces a range of legal battles.

He declined to say whether he had advised any state legislatures — which have become hubs for Republican efforts to push claims of election fraud — on voting issues. And he insisted that his two-page memo, which he said he hastily wrote while on Christmas vacation with his family in Texas, had been taken out of context, but defended his view that Mr. Pence could have done far more to help Mr. Trump.

“I won’t be cowed by public opposition to it,” Mr. Eastman said.

He added: “There are lots of allegations out there that didn’t get their day in court and lots of people that believe them and wish they got their day in court. and I am working very diligently with several teams — statistical teams, election specialists teams, all sorts of teams — to try and identify the various claims and determine whether they have merit or there is reasonable explanation for them.”

Like many of the lawyers who worked in Mr. Trump’s administration, Mr. Eastman had strong conservative legal credentials, initially giving him a patina of respect in Mr. Trump’s inner circle.

Mr. Eastman attended law school at the University of Chicago and clerked for both Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge who President George W. Bush considered for the Supreme Court. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and a former dean of the law school at Chapman University in Orange County, Calif. For two decades, he ran his own small law firm that focused on representing conservatives on issues like free speech, religious liberty, abortion and immigration.

After Election Day, Mr. Eastman served as a behind-the-scenes legal quarterback of sorts for Mr. Trump, alarming some of Mr. Trump’s aides, who feared he had found someone to enable his worst instincts at one of the most dangerous moments of his presidency. And it surprised many of Mr. Eastman’s longtime friends and others, who questioned whether his access to power had skewed his vision of reality.

“You’re always at risk when every fail-safe mechanism breaks down,” Mr. Bolton said.

Mr. Eastman’s role in Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power began the weekend after the election in Philadelphia, where Mr. Eastman had traveled for an academic conference. At a nearby hotel, Mr. Trump’s closest aides, including Corey Lewandowski, were putting together a legal brief to challenge the results in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Eastman had put himself on the radar of Mr. Trump’s political aides during the election when Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign, had shared on Twitter an article Mr. Eastman had written. 

In fact, the article, in an echo of racist questions stoked by Mr. Trump about where President Barack Obama had been born, questioned whether Kamala Harris*, Mr. Biden’s running mate, could legally become president because her parents had not been born in the United States. (OMG!)

*Vice President Kamala Harris- Early life, family and education (1964–1990) Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964! 

"...closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs" - Trump's height of folly

Republican alert- Food prices are already causing budget stress in many homes, but the cost of groceries was removed from the index used to determine the rate of inflation. Shutting down the Mexico border will have immediate negative economic impact. In my opinion, closing the Mexico border is a stupid Trumposity and will cause food prices to soar, may even cause hording. 

"60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona"- Associated Press published in the Ohio newspaper, The Independent.

EL PASO, Texas — Donald Trump’s threat to shut down the southern border raised fears Monday of dire economic consequences in the U.S. and an upheaval of daily life in a stretch of the country that relies on the international flow of not just goods and services but also students, families and workers.

Politicians, business leaders and economists warned that such a move would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping.

“Let’s hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools’ joke,” said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. He said Trump’s threat would be the “height of folly,” noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6 billion in goods cross the border every day.

“If trade were interrupted, U.S. producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and U.S. exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market,” he said.

Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point.

Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict “severe economic harm.”

In California’s Imperial Valley, across from Mexicali, Mexico, farmers rely on workers who come across every day from Mexico to harvest fields of lettuce, carrots, onions and other winter vegetables. Shopping mall parking lots in the region are filled with cars with Mexican plates.

More than 60 percent of all Mexican winter produce consumed in the U.S. crosses into the country at Nogales, Arizona. The winter produce season is especially heavy right now, with the import of Mexican-grown watermelons, grapes and squash, said Lance Jungmeyer, president of the Fresh Produce Association of the Americas.

Nogales border crossing

He said 11,000 to 12,000 commercial trucks cross the border at Nogales daily, laden with about 50 million pounds of produce such as eggplants, tomatoes, bell peppers, lettuce, cucumbers and berries.

He said a closing of the border would lead to immediate layoffs and result in shortages and price increases at grocery stores and restaurants.

“If this happens — and I certainly hope it doesn’t — I’d hate to go into a grocery store four or five days later and see what it looks like,” Jungmeyer said.

Laredo Mayor Pete Saenz, chairman of the Texas Border Coalition, said a closure would be catastrophic.

“Closing the border would cause an immediate depression in border state communities and, depending on the duration, a recession in the rest of the country,” he said.

“Our business would end,” said Marta Salas, an employee at an El Paso shop near the border that sells plastic flowers that are used on the Mexican side by families holding quinceañeras, the traditional coming-of-age celebrations.

Salas said her whole family, including relatives who attend the University of Texas at El Paso, would be affected if the border were closed.

“There are Americans who live there. I have nephews who come to UTEP, to grade school, to high school every day,” Salas said.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration said Monday as many as 2,000 U.S. inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned.

That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border.

The effects were evident Monday: Sergio Amaya, a 24-year-old American citizen who lives in Juarez, Mexico, and attends UTEP, said it normally takes him two minutes to cross the bridge. It took an hour this time.

“The Border Patrol agent said it’s going to get worse,” Amaya said.

Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system.

“The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it,” Nielsen said.

In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico.

Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children.

Roman Catholics called to stop evil immigration policies

Finally! Thank you US Catholic Bishops ~
American Bishops are rightly calling the immigration practices "evil". 

United States Council of Catholic Bishops

Now, after declaring the Donald Trump immigration policies as "evil", especially the practice of separating innocent children from their parents, the Bishops must also issue a call to action!

Roman Catholics must rally behind the Bishops on this immigration policy. An echo article published in The Independent by Michelle Boorstein 

United States Roman Catholic Bishops finally voiced strong opposition to the Trump administration's evil immigration policies.

Trump administration’s immigration policies are ‘immoral’, say leading Catholic bishops.

Bishops have escalated their criticism of the Trump administration and suggested that Catholics involved in implementing its policies could face 'penalties'

Leading US Catholic bishops have escalated their criticism of the Trump administration's immigration policies, calling new asylum-limiting rules "immoral" and rhetorically comparing the crackdown to abortion by saying it is a "a right to life" issue.

One bishop from the US-Mexico border region reportedly suggested "canonical penalties" - which could refer to withholding the sacrament of Communion - for Catholics involved in implementing the Trump policies.

The comments came as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops - the organizing body of bishops - gathered for a biannual meeting in
Fort Lauderdale. The topics of migration and asylum have long been a focus for the US church; more than 50 per cent of US Catholics under the age of 30 are Latinos.

The statements, including by the Conference's president, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston, came two days after Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that fear of domestic violence or gang violence aren't clear grounds for seeking asylum in the United States. Mr Sessions said asylum claims have expanded too broadly.

But the bishops said the ruling this week came on top of other Trump White House moves that they oppose. Those include ending a program that protected from deportation the "dreamers," young undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, and reducing significantly the number of refugees allowed into the United States.

"At its core, asylum is an instrument to preserve the right to life. The Attorney General's recent decision elicits deep concern because it potentially strips asylum from many women who lack adequate protection. These vulnerable women will now face return to the extreme dangers of domestic violence in their home country. This decision negates decades of precedents that have provided protection to women fleeing domestic violence," Cardinal DiNardo said in a statement in his capacity as USCCB president.

The statement also condemned the "continued use of family separation at the US/Mexico border as an implementation of the Administration's zero tolerance policy. Our government has the discretion in our laws to ensure that young children are not separated from their parents and exposed to irreparable harm and trauma. Families are the foundational element of our society and they must be able to stay together."

The bishops' statement came a day after representatives of the biggest Protestant group in the United States - the Southern Baptist Convention - voted for a resolution that calls for protection of US borders along with a "pathway to legal status" and an emphasis on protecting family units.

According to the Religion News Service, Tucson Bishop Edward Weisenburger raised the possibility of implementing canonical penalties for Catholics "who are involved in this," referring to children being separated from their families at the border. Canonical penalties can range from denial of sacraments to excommunication, though Mr Weisenburger did not specify what he intended beyond referring to sanctions that already exist for "life issues," RNS reported.US attorney general Jeff Sessions to Oakland mayor: 'how dare you' expose immigration raid

"Canonical penalties are there in place to heal," Mr Weisenburger said. "And therefore, for the salvation of these people's souls, maybe it's time for us to look at canonical penalties."

Efforts to reach Mr. Weisenburger for details were not immediately successful late on Wednesday.

Some activists noted that it was rare for bishops to even talk about spiritual penalties in a political context, aside from warnings from some bishops to politicians who support abortion rights. 

John Gehring, a former USCCB staffer who is now a progressive faith advocate at Faith in Public Life, tweeted that "it's hard to overstate" the significance of Mr Weisenburger's remarks.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, RNS reported, "proposed that a group of bishops be sent to the border to inspect the detention facilities where children are kept as a 'sign of our pastoral concern and protest against the hardening of the American heart.' Bishop Oscar Cantú of Las Cruces, New Mexico, suggested 'public gestures' such as prayer vigils in front of federal courthouses."

Cardinal Sean O'Malley, a confidant of Pope Francis who heads the Boston archdiocese, released a statement saying that while immigration policy is complex and must respect a variety of national and security needs, it is at its core "about people, young and old, alone or in families, often fearful and abandoned. Immigration policy is a moral question that cannot be separated from decisions of what it is right and wrong, of justice and injustice. It is about respecting and reverencing the dignity of the human person."
The new US immigration policies, Cardinal O'Malley said, "fail to communicate a willingness to address the reality of widespread human suffering, and in many cases imminent danger, with compassion and care."

"As a Catholic bishop, I support political and legal authority. I have always taught respect for the civil law and will continue to do so. But, I cannot be silent when our country's immigration policy destroys families, traumatises parents, and terrorises children. The harmful and unjust policy of separating children from their parents must be ended."

It wasn't clear what leverage the bishops might have with the Trump administration, whose faith advisory council is composed exclusively of evangelicals (MaineWriter ~ OMG! Help us!).

"When you have a social crisis of this magnitude, you have to look with two levels," said the Rev. Bryan Hehir, secretary for social services and health care for the Boston archdiocese. "You want to affect the policy, to make a counter-argument. Secondly I think from a historical perspective people will look back on this period of time and ask: 'Who said what?'"

Isolated in the West Wing

Katy Bar the Door!   Prophesy in idiom.

(From a book of poems called King's Tragedy by D. G. Rossetti published in 1881. It tells of an attempt by one Catherine to save the life of Scotland's James I by throwing her arm across a doorway to bar his enemies.)

Hope Hicks resigns: The Trump administration officials who have left since he took office ~ Departure of communications chief Hope Hicks underscores Trump administration's unusually high rate of turnover.

In the White House, it's becoming increasingly obvious how the failed Donald Trump administration needs the equivalent of a Katy, but for a reason that's opposite from the idiom's meaning. 

What's needed is the proverbial and brave "Katy" to save Donald Trump from the damage he is doing to himself, while he's becoming increasingly isolated in the White House West Wing.

Surely, the Oval Office is getting lonelier as the requiem of the litany of departures is becoming more somber.  Hope Hick's is the fourth communications person to be let go. Trying to keep up with the style of incoming, as one after another leaves, must cause the surviving staffs to be sharing Xanax for their anxiety disorders.

Donald Trump can no longer talk to his son Jared Kushner because the family adviser has lost his top secret security clearance.  

There's only one reason for this downgrade to have happened and that's because of Kushner's business dealings with foreign countries.  

In other words, in Russian, it's what' called "kompromat" or blackmail. 

Here's who shut the door behind them:

Steve Bannon~ An architect of Trump’s presidential campaign, the former Breitbart (aka "barfcart) news head cast himself as the guardian of Mr Trump’s populist platform. While the White House cast Bannon’s August 2017 decision to leave the administration as amicable, the relationship between Trump and Bannon disintegrated upon publication of a book that quoted Bannon disparaging the President’s family. 

Reince Priebus ~ Trump's decision to make this former Republican National Committee chair his chief of staff was seen as building a bridge to a Republican establishment. But, Trump was said to chafe at Priebus, who resigned in July of 2017.

Michael Flynn ~ Trump’s initial National Security Adviser lasted less than a month.  Retired Lt. Gen. Flynn resigned after it emerged he had lied about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the US. In fact, Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about discussions with then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Anthony Scaramucci ~ Blink and you might have missed Scaramucci’s brief tenure. He was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly in July of 2018, days after he launched into a profanity-laced tirade blasting other administration members during a phone call with a reporter.

Sean Spicer ~ The Trump administration’s first Press Secretary resigned in July of 2017, about a week before the ouster of Priebus, after objecting to the appointment of Scaramucci.

Michael Dubke ~ Yet another former member of the Trump White House’s communications team, Dubke resigned from his post as communications director in May of 2017.

"Katy bar the door" to keep Donald Trump isolated from causing his own misbehavior.

And the list continues at this link reported in The Indpendent by Jeremy B. White.