Stephen Miller Not Saying Americans In Mexico Can't Come Home ... Yet

The first rule of 'It's Still In Draft Form' Club is you can't talk about what's still in draft form.

Time for some more security theater from the Trump administration. They don't have a plan to deal with COVID-19, but they're queuing up some more empty gestures, so get ready to please clap.

 The New York Times was first to report that Trump's helpful minions are debating a plan to fight the virus by excluding American citizens and legal US residents from entering the country if border agents believe they may have been exposed to the virus. Never mind that we're arguably the worst hotspot on earth, with endemic community spread. Forget about the big, beautiful wall around the country since no one else will let us in anymore. Ignore the fact that the president is now scream-tweeting a demand that college football players risk their longterm health for our amusement.

Because it's A MERGENCY, and so the federal government has no choice but to tell Americans to keep out! And in case you hadn't guessed, it's not the Canadian border that the Trump administration has on its mind.

"As noted, the stress that COVID-19 has placed on the Mexican health care system has driven U.S. citizens, L.P.R.s [lawful permanent residents] and others from Mexico into the United States to seek care," the Times says, quoting a draft of the proposed regulation. So they're explicitly basing this emergency ordinance on problems with the Mexican healthcare system, not on a generalized fear of overburdening the American healthcare system.

Which kind of gives the whole game away — if border control agents are vested with the discretion to exclude American citizens based on generalized fears about the virus in Mexico, what's to stop them arbitrarily excluding Americans of color and Central American green card holders at the border based on a subjective, unreviewable judgment?

The ACLU, God bless 'em, is vowing to fight any such order.

"The Trump administration has rolled out one border ban after another — most recently on children and asylum seekers — using COVID-19 as an excuse, while failing abysmally to get the virus under control in the United States," Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project, responded . "The rumored order would be another grave error in a year that has already seen far too many."

Naturally, the xenophobic dicks at the White House are trying to blame this one on the Centers for Disease Control, casting the proposed law as a public health measure. As if Stephen Miller doesn't wake up in the morning thinking about ways to keep brown people out of America.

"Career professionals at the CDC are working on an overall approach to pandemic control both now and in the future," an administration official told CNN , conveniently eliding the fact that public health officials have said this would do exactly nothing to control the spread of a virus that has already firmly entrenched itself in the nation's unmasked nasal cavities. "The regulation is in draft form and subject (to) change. This is an ongoing process and any reporting on this would be extremely premature."

In summary and in conclusion, the virus is just about to disappear, and we have it well under control, and deaths are inevitable because it is what it is. Schools must open at capacity, the country needs football, and mask requirements are a blatant abridgment of our freedoms. Also, this is an emergency, and we must exclude American citizens from their country to protect American citizens. And most importantly, reporters are not allowed to discuss the proposed rule, because it is ... "premature." So there.

[ NYT / CNN ]

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