Not nasty enough..

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Maine Sen. Susan Collins is the first — and so far only — Republican senator to sign on to a bill guaranteeing back pay for federal contractors in the wake of the 35-day government shutdown. The bill would ensure that contractors, who typically haven’t received back pay in the past, also get paychecks for the time they missed as a result of the stalemate.

Only one Republican has signed on to a bill guaranteeing back pay for federal contractors - Vox

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Let this sink in, a deliberate policy of creating orphans. And that from the party supposedly strongly in favor of family values..

As part of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Administration officials have admitted that it would take too much effort to reunite families the government separated before it implemented its zero-tolerance policy towards asylum seekers and others that the government enacted last April. The administration also does not refute a report from the Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services released in January that claims “thousands” more families had been separated that had previously been mentioned, and that family separations were ongoing prior to the formal introduction of the policies that have led to 2,800 children being separated from their families from April to June of 2018.  HHS has also said that they simply do not know how many children have been separated from their parents — and that because no one implemented any form of record keeping on these separations, it would be an undue “burden” to do so.

Jallyn Sualog,  deputy director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said that, “In my judgment, ORR does not have the requisite staff for such a project,” indicating that it would take 100 analysis from the ORR without full eight-hour days somewhere between 7-15 months to “even begin reconciling” the requisite data.

“The Trump administration’s response is a shocking concession that it can’t easily find thousands of children it ripped from parents and doesn’t even think it’s worth the time to locate each of them,” said ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt, via a statement. “The administration also doesn’t dispute that separations are ongoing in significant numbers.”

Trump administration claims reuniting separated families is a ‘burden’ – Alternet.org

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The University of Farmington website described a college that would prepare students to succeed in an “ever-globalizing economy.” Students would show up at campus wearing backpacks and asking questions about classes. The US government listed Farmington as eligible to enroll foreign students. The school president, whose LinkedIn page is still online, sent emails to students describing his institution as “a nationally accredited institution authorized to enroll international students.”
But it was all a sham to snare immigrants.

How the US government created a fake university to snare immigrant students | US news | The Guardian

Are people who want to acquire skills, enabling them to contribute and become productive members of society targets for a government sponsored con job in order to trap them and kick them out? 

Who wins from this? 

Who comes up with such a scheme? Only nasty people..

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Get your head around this:

Trump administration officials privately acknowledged that they had no way to reunite thousands of separated immigrant parents and children, according to emails published by NBC News on Wednesday. "[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services (HHS) official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children." The emails, provided to NBC by the House Judiciary Committee, showed that officials privately said they only had information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids.

Trump officials said they had 'no way to link' separated migrant families, emails show | TheHill

But they separated them anyway, creating hundreds of orphans and thousands of traumatized children (and parents).

Shame on them!

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President Trump’s cruel policy of separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border ranks among the worst of his administration’s many bad decisions. The policy was put in place last year to serve as a warning to people who were living in fear of gangs and other mortal dangers in their home countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador and who were considering seeking asylum in the U.S. The policy was a simple one: If a migrant family crossed the border and asked for asylum, the parents would likely be sent to jail on misdemeanor criminal charges and the children farmed out to other relatives in the U.S., to family friends, or to strangers in the foster care system. Even many of Trump’s staunch supporters balked at the ruthless, coldhearted policy, and Trump, under pressure, ordered it ended last June. A week later, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego added a court order to the mix, banning family separations unless they are necessary for the safety of the child. That reasonable accommodation turns out to have been a loophole through which the government has continued to separate families.

The government is still separating migrant families at the border. It needs to stop - Los Angeles Times

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Waters, the committee chair, also ripped into Carson, characterizing HUD’s plan to reduce rental assistance as “outrageous” and a separate plan to bar undocumented immigrants from subsidized housing as “cruel.” “The department is actively causing harm,” Waters told him. Carson replied by telling her that HUD’s goal is to “come up with better, more efficient ways so we don’t leave people in a situation where they become dependent.” During an exchange with Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), Carson deflected a question about whether HUD had considered the fate of tens of thousands of children who would be made homeless by the undocumented immigrants proposal

Ben Carson’s first hearing before Maxine Waters’s committee was a mess - Vox

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A man who says he gave food, water and shelter to migrants is facing up to 20 years in prison for “shielding” the men from US authorities.  Scott Warren, from Arizona, was arrested by border patrol agents last year along with two undocumented men who had recently crossed into the country from Mexico.  Prosecutors said the 36-year-old harboured the two men – Kristian Perez-Villanueva, of El Salvador, and Arnaldo Sacaria-Goday, of Honduras – as part of an alleged conspiracy to protect them from law enforcement. Mr Warren’s defence lawyer said his client was working “squarely and fully” within the law as part of voluntary work to halt migrant deaths in Arizona.

Man faces 20 years in prison for ‘giving migrants food, water and shelter’ near US border | The Independent

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The GOP’s senate plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, will result in 22 million fewer people with health insurance by 2026 compared to Obamacare, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s like taking health coverage away from a country as big as Australia. If the plan passes through the Senate and becomes law, health researcher and writer Atul Gawande told Vox, “There will be deaths.”

But getting a firm number on exactly how many deaths an ACA repeal would lead to is surprisingly contentious.
We don’t have any direct evidence of Obamacare’s impact on mortality, since it takes a long time for changes in things like health insurance to show up in death statistics, and the law was only enacted in 2009, as I’ve explained in a summary of the science on health insurance and mortality. (Studies looking at whether the ACA improved people’s health status and access to health care have had positive results, which suggests it should increase longevity.)

We do have something else though: very high-quality studies on the impacts of health insurance on mortality, which come to some pretty clear estimates. This research suggests that we would see more than 24,000 extra deaths per year in the US if 20 million people lost their coverage. And 20 million is less than the 22 million Americans the CBO expects will lose insurance by 2026. So the death toll from the GOP’s Obamacare repeal and replacement plan could be even higher..

But Medicaid expansion has not been spread evenly throughout the US, and the Supreme Court ruled it was an optional feature of the ACA in 2012. This was clearly a loss for poorer Americans but it was a win for science: It led to a series of natural experiments across the country, in which researchers have compared the mortality rates in places that expanded coverage with the rates in places that didn’t.

• The researchers behind this 2012 New England Journal of Medicine study took advantage of that variation: They compared what happened to health in three states (New York, Maine, and Arizona) that expanded Medicaid eligibility since 2000 to neighboring states without expansions, covering a period of five years before and five years after each state's expansion. They found mortality declined in places that expanded Medicaid by 20 deaths per 100,000, unlike neighboring states that didn’t expand Medicaid. Extrapolating that to the estimated 20 million who could lose health insurance with an ACA repeal, other researchers have suggested this would translate to 43,956 deaths in the US per year.
  
• Massachusetts has also offered a natural experiment for researchers who want to understand the impact of expanding health insurance on mortality rates. The state underwent a health reform in 2006 with the goal of providing insurance to almost all of its residents — and it became the model for the ACA. The best paper on this, published in 2014 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, compared the mortality rates in Massachusetts counties from 2001 to 2005 (before health reform expanded insurance) and 2007 to 2010 (after health reforms) to changes in control counties with similar demographic and economic conditions. Here, they found that the health insurance expansion prevented 320 deaths per year since it began in 2006. If that pattern holds for the ACA, the White House Council of Economic Advisers has estimated that it means 24,000 deaths per year nationwide are averted because of the ACA. (Others, including researcher Harold Pollack, have made the same calculation.)
  

The GOP plan for Obamacare could kill more people each year than gun homicides - Vox

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Family separations still going on at the border, read the whole story:

Like Isidoridy, Rivas has also witnessed the devastating outcomes of the Remain in Mexico policy, including family separations. “It’s not uncommon for a married couple to be separated under Remain in Mexico,” Rivas said. “But what I’ve seen is mind-boggling.” Rivas met a mother who, at seven months pregnant, was separated from her husband and child at the U.S.-Mexico border. The husband and child were sent into the interior of the United States while the mother was sent back to Mexico. “It’s unfathomable for them to be separating pregnant women and sending them back to Mexico when they’re obviously a vulnerable population,” Rivas added. “All of the pregnant women that I met who were sent back were over 7 months pregnant. All except for one who was 5 months.” Non-traditional families like same-sex partners, adoptive families without the proper paperwork, or family units that aren’t parent-child are likely to be at a higher risk of separation. “Those kinds of families would definitely be separated under a program like this,” Isidoridy said. “I think a lot of it has to do with disorganization and distrust of the individuals for coming. I mean they were talking about starting biometrics but it really shows a lack of understanding what kinds of situations these people are fleeing from and what kind of conversation is being had being had before fleeing for your life.”

Trump’s secret family separation policy – ThinkProgress

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An official representing the Trump administration argued in court that it should not be required to provide toothbrushes, soap and even proper beds to detained children at the US-Mexico border. During a Court of Appeals hearing in San Francisco on Tuesday, government lawyer Sarah Fabian maintained that it was "safe and sanitary" for children to sleep on the concrete floor in detention facilities. Her comments were made as attorneys representing detained children at the border claimed that the government is not abiding by the requirements of a 1997 settlement agreement which set a framework for decent humane treatment of detained minors. The settlement specified that children must be housed in "safe and sanitary conditions", saying that amongst other things, they should at least be provided with soap and toothbrushes.

Trump official tries to argue that detained children don’t need soap, toothbrushes, or beds | indy100

They argued this in court. The judges were quite surprised. These kids overwhelmingly come from terrible circumstances after a terrible journey, are in pretty bad shape and are now lumped on concrete floors with little facilities in very overcrowded places. 

And then there are the separations..