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  1. #1
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    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees

    All things considered it's hard to imagine how petty these partisan squabbles will seem to these people once they get their heads around what's going on in American politics and society.
    Imagine what they must think when they hear some confused gender identitys biggest concern is what personal pronoun they should be addressed by, when their Afghan 'they' is more concerned about whether they'll be beheaded in a public spectacle or hanged in a public spectacle because of their sexuality. Kind of puts things in perspective.
    Then you've got these assholes.

    WASHINGTON (AP) — As tens of thousands of Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban arrive in the U.S., a handful of former Trump administration officials are working to turn Republicans against them.
    The former officials are writing position papers, appearing on conservative television outlets and meeting privately with GOP lawmakers — all in an effort to turn the collapse of Afghanistan into another opportunity to push a hard-line immigration agenda.
    “It is a collaboration based on mutual conviction,” said Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s most conservative immigration policies and among those engaged on the issue. “My emphasis has been in talking to members of Congress to build support for opposing the Biden administration's overall refugee plans."
    The approach isn’t embraced by all Republican leaders, with some calling it mean-spirited and at odds with Christian teachings that are important to the white evangelicals who play a critical role in the party’s base. The strategy relies on tactics that were commonplace during Trump’s tenure and that turned off many voters, including racist tropes, fear-mongering and false allegations.
    And the hard-liners pay little heed to the human reality unfolding in Afghanistan, where those who worked with Americans during the war are desperate to flee for fear they could be killed by the new Taliban regime.
    But the Republicans pushing the issue are betting they can open a new front in the culture wars they have been fighting since President Joe Biden's election by combining the anti-immigrant sentiment that helped fuel Trump’s political rise with widespread dissatisfaction with the Afghan withdrawal. That, they hope, could keep GOP voters motivated heading into next year’s midterms, when control of Congress is at stake.
    “From a political standpoint, cultural issues are the most important issues that are on the mind of the American people,” said Russ Vought, Trump’s former budget chief and president of the Center for Renewing America, a nonprofit group that has been working on building opposition to Afghan refugee settlement in the U.S. along with other hot-button issues, like critical race theory, which considers American history through the lens of racism.
    His group is working, he said, to “kind of punch through this unanimity that has existed” that the withdrawal was chaotic, but that Afghan refugees deserve to come to the U.S.
    Officials insist that every Afghan headed for the country is subject to extensive vetting that includes thorough biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement and counterterrorism personnel. At a pair of hearings this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said those “rigorous security checks” begin in transit countries before refugees arrive in the U.S. and continue at U.S. military bases before anyone is resettled. Checks then continue as refugees await further processing.
    But Trump and his allies, who worked to sharply curtain refugee admissions while they were in office, insist the refugees pose a threat.
    “Who are all of the people coming into our Country?” Trump asked in a recent statement. “How many terrorists are among them?”
    With the U.S. confronting a host of challenges, it's unclear whether voters will consider immigration a leading priority next year. It was a key motivator for voters in the 2018 midterm elections, with 4 in 10 Republicans identifying it as the top issue facing the country, according to AP VoteCast data. But it became far less salient two years later, when only 3% of 2020 voters — including 5% of Republicans — named it as the No. 1 issue facing the country amid the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic woes.
    When it comes to refugees, 68% of Americans say they support the U.S. taking in those fleeing Afghanistan after security screening, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll in late August and early September. That includes a majority — 56% — of Republicans.
    The party's leaders are far from united. Dozens of Republican lawmakers and their offices have been working tirelessly to try to help Afghans flee the country. And some, like Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have admonished those in his party who have suggested the Afghans pose a security risk.
    Some of the skepticism voiced by the right has been exacerbated by the Biden administration's refusal to date to provide an accounting of who was able to leave Afghanistan during the U.S.'s chaotic evacuation campaign from Kabul's airport.
    The State Department has said that more than 23,800 Afghans arrived in the U.S. between Aug. 17-31. Thousands more remain at U.S. military sites overseas for screening and other processing. But officials have said they are still working to compile the breakdown of how many are applicants to the Special Immigrant Visa program designed to help Afghan interpreters and others who served side-by-side with Americans, how many are considered other “Afghans at risk,” like journalists and human rights workers, and how many fall into other categories.
    The organization War Time Allies estimates as many as 20,000 special visa applicants remain in the country, not counting their families and others eligible to come to the U.S.
    Ken Cuccinelli, who served as Trump's acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and is now a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, says he doesn't believe the refugees have faced sufficient review.
    “It’s unachievable as a simple administrative matter,” he said of the process. While Cuccinelli, like Miller, believes that SIVs should be allowed to come to the U.S., he argues that the other refugees should be resettled in the region, closer to home.
    The "mass importation of potentially hundreds of thousands of people who do not share American cultural, political, or ideological commonalities poses serious risks to both national security and broader social cohesion," he wrote in a recent position paper on the group’s website that cites Pew Research Center polling on beliefs about Sharia law and suicide bombings.
    Other former administration officials strongly disagree with such inflammatory language.
    “Some of the people who’ve always been immigration hard-liners are seeing this wrongly as an opportunity ahead of the midterms to, lack a better term, stoke fear of, ‘I don’t want these people in my country,’” said Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon press secretary who also served as White House communications director under Trump.
    Farah said she has been working to “politely shift Republican sentiment” away from arguments that she sees as both factually false and politically questionable. The Republican Party, she noted, includes a majority of veterans — many of whom worked closely alongside Afghans on the ground and have led the push to help their former colleagues escape — as well as evangelical Christians, who have historically welcomed refugees with open arms.
    “It's totally misreading public sentiment to think that Republicans should not be for relocating Afghan refugees who served along side the U.S.," she said. “The Christian community is there. The veterans community is for it.”
    ___ Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut in Washington, Julie Watson in San Diego and Ellen Knickmeyer in Oklahoma City contributed to this report
    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees

    The idea that after all they've gone through these people should become political pawns infuriates me.
    “If we stop testing right now we’d have very few cases, if any.” Donald J Trump.

  2. #2
    Thailand Expat misskit's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cujo View Post
    The idea that after all they've gone through these people should become political pawns infuriates me.
    Sorry state of affairs it is.

    Stephen Miller’s plan. No surprise.

    You would think people would welcome immigrants with open arms right now. There is a shortage of workers everywhere in the US.

  3. #3
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    The US has taken less than half the amount of Afghan refo's that peewee Australia has. The UK has taken even more than Australia. And how many Syria refugees has the US accepted? The decimation of Libya has resulted in a flood of refugees from Nth & Saharan Africa to Europe- provoking a humanitarian crisis. How many of these refugees has the Land of the Free taken?

    That's the modern day USA for ya- No care taken, No responsibility accepted. Seems like a sick joke now, dunnit:-


    “Give me your tired, your poor,

    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  4. #4
    Thailand Expat tomcat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sabang View Post
    That's the modern day USA for ya- No care taken, No responsibility accepted.
    ...so, your application for refugee status was rejected then...

  5. #5
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    Oh yeh, us aussies are just dying to get to the Land of the Free. Actually, we die on your behalf in entirely more exotic places.

  6. #6
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    The US unlike other countries that organically derive their cohesion trough a shared ethnic identity, it derives its cohesion through a shared trust in the institutions that bind them.
    trump and others , for political gain have eroded the trust in these institutions while all the time claiming MAGA.
    A bit of "divide and conquer" only it seems he accomplished only the divide part.
    The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cujo
    Trump aides
    I think the correct term is minion.

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by misskit View Post
    Stephen Miller
    Scum

    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees-ejmp4uhuwau5exz-jpg

    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees-dgubz50uiaaaulo-jpg

  9. #9
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    Quote Originally Posted by bsnub View Post
    Scum

    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees-ejmp4uhuwau5exz-jpg

    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees-dgubz50uiaaaulo-jpg

    He totally reminds me of
    Adolph Eichmann.
    Trump aides aim to build GOP opposition to Afghan refugees-adolf_eichmann-_1942-jpg


    Eichmann and his staff became responsible for Jewish deportations to extermination camps, where the victims were gassed. Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, and Eichmann oversaw the deportation of much of the Jewish population. Most of the victims were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, where about 75 per cent were murdered upon arrival. By the time the transports were stopped in July 1944, 437,000 of Hungary's 725,000 Jews had been killed. Dieter Wisliceny testified at Nuremberg that Eichmann told him he would "leap laughing into the grave because the feeling that he had five million people] on his conscience would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."[

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