Miles Taylor's account of his role in family separation, in his Post interview, has a chronology I can't make sense of. washingtonpost.com/politics/anony… 1/
First, he says he started as deputy Chief of Staff "the week that Jeff Sessions announced zero tolerance." Technically that was the first week of April 2018, but maybe Taylor is referring to the speech Sessions gave in early May 2018 that coincided with DHS joining the policy. 2/
But then there's this, which says he didn't resign over family separation because "basically that same month, in August or September 2018," there were rumors of a DHS purge. 3/
No one's memory is perfect. But I'm having trouble squaring remembering when zero tolerance started because it's _the week you started your job,_ & saying you didn't resign because of something that happened "basically that month" which you remember as happening 3-4 months later.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I was thinking so much about this story as I wrapped up the piece we published yesterday. propublica.org/article/trump-… If you think of policy as "strategy" + "operation," this week's piece is about the former and the January piece the latter.
Increasingly, I believe that journalism in 2020 (at its best) isn't the first draft of history — social media and cameraphones mean we are _awash_ in primary documents — but the second draft: the effort to begin to move from simply bearing witness to taking _stock._
This stuff is kind of overstated. Stephen Miller did a campaign press call today! DHS has been doing a press-conference swing state roadshow! I think what has changed is that _Trump himself_ is more liable to hijack whole news cycles with tweets on other stuff, relative to 16.
There is also a willingness to treat the messages of urban unrest as credible, when in 2016 they were tried out but pretty totally ignored, and therefore used less often.
Oh, the other big big thing here is that Biden isn’t as actively seeking out a contrast with Trump on these issues as Clinton did.
This is, honestly, the thing about the "police abolitionists are asking for more places to be policed like white suburbia" take that throws me. White suburbia absolutely has a policing presence. It's just always, always understood to be protecting "you" from "them."
There is, in fact, a vision of policing that says that's what everyone should have! But it's a reformist vision that is focused on making police accountable and trustworthy to the communities they police. (2/3)
I’ve been working on this—my first @ProPublica feature—for months. It’s the story of one family, split in half for no reason by Border Patrol. It’s also a story of how completely US border policy has changed in past yr.
@propublica At the border, the new normal is this: depending on where and when asylum-seekers cross, they can be put into any of a number of programs that are designed to get them off US soil as quickly as possible. 2/
@propublica The Trump admin has piloted & expanded several of these programs. There’s MPP (“Remain in Mexico”), which hasn’t attracted much public attn despite some GREAT reporting on it (I’ll link @ end of thread). 3/
The US is taking some families who seek asylum in the US and, instead of letting them make their case or even screening them for asylum eligibility, sending them to Guatemala to seek asylum there instead.
Guatemala hasn’t released updated staffing stats for how many asylum officers it has. As of this summer it had 11. “Seeking asylum in Guatemala” is basically not a thing that existed prior to the US sending people to do it, as a way to keep them from seeking it here.
I am really trying to stop freaking out about the “kids in cages” trope, but this is what immigration policy looks like at the end of 2019. The goal is to get people out of custody as quickly as possible by getting them out of the United States as quickly as possible.
So...I just saw about the part of Mark Zuckerberg’s speech last week where he says he founded Facebook because the Iraq War told him more people needed their perspectives heard.
And as a 2005-present Facebook user, I have never felt so gaslit in my life. That’s not what it was.
A few reminders re early FB:
-News Feed wasn’t part of the original UI.
-Status updates weren’t part of the original UI.
-Wall posts as discrete entities weren’t part of the original UI (it was just a text-box sandbox).
-groups were only open to a given school.
In other words...no way to use FB to share your individual perspectives; no way to use FB to develop connections beyond your “bubble”