Immigration

Republicans Whip Up Pre-Midterm Fears With Lies About Invading Migrant Caravan: Reason Roundup

Plus: Trump condemns poor cover-up of Saudi journalist killing and Houston compromises on sex robots.

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CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom

Lies, lies, and more lies about caravan of Central American refugees. America has a process in place for handling those fleeing from authoritarian, war-torn, crime-wrecked, and disaster-devastated countries. Many such individuals from Central America—including a lot of desperate, desolate, and powerless women and children—are now seeking to avail themselves of this process by showing up at specified U.S.-Mexico border spots to officially apply for asylum. For some reason, this terrifies Republicans.

Or at least they're pretending to be terrified. Most folks in the "migrant caravan" coming up from Central America are following the rules we set, which should ostensibly make it more difficult for folks to pull the "we don't hate Hispanics, we just don't want them in the country illegally" shtick.

But President Trump and his acolytes have sidestepped this by simply lying, repeatedly, about our southern neighbors seeking refuge in the U.S. To hear Trump and company tell it, the caravan is basically all MS-13 gang members, brown men seeking to rape white women, and the occasional member of ISIS who came all the way over from the Middle East to get in on this caravan thing.

"It doesn't matter if it's 100 percent accurate," a Trump official told The Daily Beast. "This is the play."

In one particularly disgusting spectacle, a Fox News segment on the caravan featured an anchor hiding in bushes until he could ambush a boat containing a (non-caravan) migrant family trying to secretly cross into the U.S. "We seem to have thwarted this attempt," the anchor boasts before interviewing a woman about why she was doing this. She says she can't find work in Honduras and criminals keep stealing her money so she was heading to the U.S. to find a job. Perhaps realizing that preventing this doesn't exactly make him the hero, the anchor hastily adds that "they're not all women and children" coming here peacefully.

Others have resorted to using old images of violence and attributing them to migrant attacks.

No proof, no problem. Trump admitted Tuesday that he has "no proof" the migrant caravan had been infiltrated by ISIS, a claims he's been making repeatedly over the past week along with claims that these evil hordes were being funded by U.S. Democrats.

The ISIS lie initially came from Judicial Watch, which twisted Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales' statement that his administration had deported around 100 ISIS members since he took office in 2016 into a claim that these terrorists were marching north into America as part of the migrant caravan.

Department of if-only: For libertarians, there are at least two frustrating threads in all this panic and hoopla. First, there are the folks who act like immigration laws and national boundaries are immutable precepts handed down from God, and that anyone who transgresses against them is morally wrong and depraved, instead of just rejecting the arbitrary policy and geography decisions that have heretofore destined them to misery.

Second, there's the Trump administration insistence that Democrats are responsible for migrants heading here because Democrats support "open borders." We have yet to have a single Democratic president, U.S. senator or representative, or party higher-up come out in favor of anything close to an open borders policy, and many of the immigration policies people on the left now object to under Trump are continuations of Obama-era policies.

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But what about the killing itself? If nothing else, President Trump objects to how bad a job the Saudis did at planning and then hiding their hand in Jamal Khashoggi's brutal murder.

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Houston reaches a compromise on sex robots.

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