Thread by @matt_cam

1/ The Trump administration is about to achieve its longtime goal of setting up an #asylum firewall in Central America which will offshore our treaty obligations the worst possible places imaginable.

Let's look ahead to what this actually means in practice.

2/ Once Honduras inevitably signs, we'll have created a sort of buffer zone through which all asylum seekers coming from south of Mexico will have to seek asylum first. (Guatemalans will still be able to seek asylum at our border per current agreements.) Out of sight, out of mind

3/ Stephen Miller and other Trump #immigration policy minions have made it explicitly clear that there is only one purpose for all of this: to get these teeming masses yearning to breathe free as far from our golden door as possible, with no regard for their lives or the law

4/ But condemning these desperate families to immiseration and death has other benefits for Trump as well--most immediately in 2020.

Imagine if this has been fully implemented for 6-8 months by next Nov. Why, he's "solved the border crisis!" By doing deals!

5/ It's hard enough to convince Americans to care about asylum-seekers already inside our borders. Once the problem is localized to Central America, we'll never have to be bothered w/it again.

Now imagine the Democratic nominee trying to convince us that we should, actually.

6/ I get into a fight with at least one liberal per week about our moral and legal responsibilities to maintain a full and fair asylum system. There's no way this will play well as part of a Democratic Presidential campaign. Not after everything we've seen on the border already.

7/

[Clip of #migrantcaravan in scary washed-out B+W]

VOICEOVER: President Trump's leadership ended the caravans and protected our homeland from fraudulent asylum seekers

[B+W clip of Elizabeth Warren]

VO: Now Democrats want to bring this crisis *back to our border*

8/ Most Americans won't care that we're breaking international and domestic law, bullying our Western Hemisphere allies, and getting hundreds of thousands of innocent men women & children killed.

They'll be told that we've solved it. Good enough!

9/ No more "kids in cages," no more concentration camps, no more huddled masses trapped under bridges, no more tent courts.

All gone!

Where did they go? Somewhere else, probably. Not here!

As a nation, we've never been great at object permanence.

10/ To be clear, all of those things will still be with us to some degree. We just won't have to think about them anymore!

Back to brunch, just where we would have been if President Hillary Clinton had inevitably carried Obama's legacy of detention + deportation forward.

11/ Meanwhile, the end of #TPS for El Salvador and Honduras will force hundreds of thousands of people back to countries they haven't seen in decades, where they will be especially vulnerable to gang violence as recent arrivals from the US perceived to have money.

12/ The asylum firewall will also help us to get ahead of the flow of climate refugees who will begin to leave the region en masse very soon. (They're already here.)

I've always believed the wall is at least in part preparing for this as well.

nbcnews.com/news/latino/ce…

13/ All of this amounts to a sickening mass abdication of our moral responsibility to people and countries we have badly harmed.

We've already set their houses on fire. Now we're just locking and barring the doors from the outside.

14/ Your chosen Dem isn't going to save the day on this. The only way justice can prevail here will be in our courts.

I'm generally against despair, but it's been a long week & I'm indulging myself a bit--just for tonight. Tomorrow I'll be back up and at it in ICE detention.