THE MIGRANTS ARE COMING!

Be very afraid or something.

As we head toward the midterm elections, Donald Trump and his pals at Fox News are doing all they can to hype fears of an unstoppable mass of dangerous criminal aliens (in other words, families seeking asylum from crime and gang violence) from Central America. Fear is always good to excite the base, and since panic over a migrant "caravan" in April led to Trump's stupid boprder military deployment and the disastrous family separation policy, why not ramp up that fear all over again, this time so Trump can implement Family Separation 2.0? OK, sure, the caravan panic is a bullshit, and it's bullshit that resulted indocumented human rights violations. But it's exciting bullshit, so Trump's running with it, because it gets his mobs -- and even members of his own lunatic cabinet -- barking mad.

Trump State TV's Laura Ingraham offered a typical scare-the-hell-outta-Uncle-Clyde story on the frightening caravan Thursday night, speculating that while it might have only started with a few hundred people, now it's in the thousands, and who know, by election day it will probably be FOUR MILLION IMMIGRATION ZOMBIES knocking down the entire border, why not? Funny how migrants all "swarm" or "infest" or other scary vermin-y verbs, huh?

We like the part where Ingraham condemns the desperate fear tactics of Democrats who are trying to gin up unreasonable fear among Latino voters to emotionally manipulate them to vote in the midterms and flip Congress, when in fact Republicans simply want to protect America from the unstoppable waves of dangerous criminals, because facts and logic. For instance, we're supposed to care about children in cages, but when do Democrats ever express any concern for all the victims of murderous immigrant murderers and rapists, which is mostly what those people are, at least in the examples of crime Fox News points at.

No American should suffer or be brutalized in order to fulfill the Democrats' fantasy of a borderless society [...]

Now, the Democrats talk [of] taking the house will ensure that this caravan of 4,000 eventually becomes a flow of 4 million, 4 million plus, before we know it. This cannot happen.

Thank goodness someone is willing to stand up against the Dems' emotional appeals to Latinos' fears, huh?

Mind you, the average Fox News viewer isn't able to set immigration policy, but the network's viewers in the White House know this caravan thing enrages the Great Man, which is why John Kelly and John Bolton had a knockdown dragout over the matter yesterday, with Bolton accusing Kelly's former aide Kirstjen Nielsen, now DHS secretary, of not taking stern enough measures to dissuade the dusky hordes. Let's not forget, the Trumpers are convinced -- evidence be damned -- that only "toughness" can keep asylum-seekers from coming to the US, which is how Kelly came up with family separation in the first place.

So obviously if more families are fleeing Central America now, we have to get even tougher, even though, as Dara Lind notes at Vox, there is literally "no evidence that harsh treatment — either separation or detention — actually works as a deterrent." Not a bit of it, except Trump's own certainty that being "tough" scares migrants away -- even though during 2017, the year of both Kelly's pilot program to try out family separation and full-blown "zero tolerance," the number of families seeking asylum actually increased. 

Ah, but even if the punitive approach to asylum seekers doesn't "work" to decrease border crossers, and simply fulfills the dire predictions of abuse predicted by human rights groups like Amnesty International, that's no reason not to take harsh measures, because cruelty will make Donald Trump happy, and it might even drive his immigrant-hating supporters to the polls. Remember, these are some very fearful people who have become convinced that a racist 1973 novel about hordes of sex-crazed brown people invading Europe actually predicted the death of "the West."

Clearly, that's worth a few minor side effects to minor children who aren't like us. For instance, four months after a federal judge ordered the government to reunite all the kids taken from their parents at the border, an ACLU report based on DOJ data finds the government is still holding 245 children taken away from their parents. 170 of those kids belong to parents who have been deported, and another 70 to parents who are still in the USA but who haven't been reunited with them, often for trumped-up reasons.

Clearly, we need to be tougher. Only when America is as hellish as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala will people decide they won't come here, and then we'll truly be great again. Surely then, Fox and Trump won't tell us to be afraid anymore.

[ Media Matters / WaPo / Vox / Amnesty International / Vox / WaPo / ACLU ]

Yr Wonkette is supported by reader donations. Please send us money so we can travel in a caravan to bring you beer and eats!