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Aberdonians to Rally for Humane Treatment of Immigrant Families; Trump Lies About Immigrant Crime

Unconvinced (and for good reason) that Donald Trump is taking sufficient action to end America’s moral atrocity of separating immigrant families at our southern border, some of my Aberdeen neighbors are joining the nationwide “Families Belong Together” protest by organizing a sister rally at Anderson Park (by Moccasin Creek and the Senior Center) next Saturday, June 30, and 10 a.m. Organizer Leslie McLaughlin explains what we’re marching for:

Families Belong Together Logo…the purpose is to protest the separation from family and incarceration of immigrant children. The recent executive order from the President does nothing for kids already in internment, and it left a number of escape hatches for future internments, so it represents too little, too late. There is much work left to do.

South Dakota is conservative, and I have to believe those conservative values include promoting intact families. I still harbor hope that my friends and neighbors can see, whatever their opinions about immigration, that harming children to serve a political agenda is simply unacceptable [Leslie McLaughlin, Families Belong Together Rally group post, 2018.06.22].

In an effort to deflect criticism from his torture of children, Donald Trump yesterday exploited crime victims to promote himself and the lie that illegal immigrants have killed 63,000 Americans since 9/11:

He later repeated one bereaved father’s unsourced claim that 63,000 Americans have been killed by undocumented immigrants since 9/11, adding that the number “is very low because things aren’t reported.” Sleuthing by the Washington Post’s Philip Bump indicates the 63,000 number comes from a long-debunked claim about immigrant homicide rates by borderline-white nationalist Iowa Rep. Steve King. (Some of the parents at the event had children who were killed not in homicides but in impaired-driving accidents—but by my quick calculations, the 63,000 number would not be accurate even if you combined an accurate estimate of the number of homicides committed by undocumented individuals with an estimate of drunk driving deaths caused by same that assumes that they cause a portion of such deaths commensurate with their portion of the U.S. population.) [Ben Mathis-Lilley, “Trump’s New Argument: If We Don’t Separate Families at the Border, ‘Illegal Aliens’ Will Murder American Kids,” Slate, 2018.06.22]

Join your neighbors in Aberdeen, Rapid City, or Sioux Falls to protest the federal government’s abuse of children and truth next Saturday.

2 Comments

  1. Debbo

    Kudos to the citizens of SD and all across the country who are working to stop this trump/GOP shameful atrocity.

    What doesn’t pres Animal Sh*thole lie about? He’s raised his rate of lying. Used to be 6.5 lies per day but it’s higher now. In my lifetime we’ve never had another president whose discourse required a rate of lies per day. He has truly earned the moniker, Liar-in-Chief.

  2. I totally appreciate you!!! Thank you for this reporting!

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