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Daily Dispatch
January 11, 2019
BREAKING NEWS
Tornillo Tent City has closed.
BREAKING: I just talked with the management at the Tornillo facility - the last kid just left. This tent city should never have stood in the first place but it is welcome news that it will be gone.
— Rep. Will Hurd (@HurdOnTheHill) January 11, 2019
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Trump begrudgingly visited the border yesterday, along with new White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone, and Senior Puppet-Master, Sean Hannity, who did not stand with the rest of the press pool but rather with DHS Sec Nielsen and Trump’s communication team.
(WaPo observes that Trump’s wardrobe was intended to mimic the optics of a natural disaster.)
It's starting to look inevitable that Trump will be declaring a national emergency very soon. Could be today, though if the government remains shutdown through tomorrow, it will be the longest in history – and you know how this guy feels about superlatives.
BTW, can we just recall for a moment that Trump’s border wall obsession was planted by campaign aides who felt he needed a mnemonic device to remind him to talk about immigration on the campaign trail?
Related: Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters is hoping to stage a performance of “The Wall” on the border in protest of Trump’s wall thing. (May I suggest he team up with John Mellencamp on this one...)
Trump is considering taking funds from flood control projects in Puerto Rico and Texas to build the border wall. A douchey thing to do, sure, but Trump says he has the "absolute right" to do it anyway.
Of the 17 Senators and House members along the southern border, Politico found that only 2 supported the border wall. You can guess which two: Martha McSally and Ted (🙄) Cruz. That’s less than 12% of border lawmakers.
(Landowners aren't so keen on it either.)
Republican leadership, however, is warming up to the idea, seeing it as the only way out. (And most are assuming it would just end up stuck in the courts anyway, so no harm done…)
Meanwhile, Dems are debating whether to prepare for litigation and/or try to pass a joint resolution that would terminate the emergency, but which Trump could veto, requiring an unlikely 2/3 override.
DHS is portraying renovations as new construction in an effort to make-true Trump’s not-true claim that “tremendous amounts” of the wall “have already been built.” From the DHS website.
Related: “Once A Fence, Later Slats, Almost Always A Wall: Trump's Border Wall Contradictions” from NPR.
Jay Root of the Texas Tribune interviewed two former drug smugglers for his latest piece: “Texas smugglers say Trump's border wall wouldn't stop immigrants, drugs from pouring across the border.”
More Stories:
Trump promises H-1B visa holders “a potential path to citizenship.”
From McClatchy: “These policy changes will impact legal immigrants in the U.S. in 2019”