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Background Briefing: October 21, 2020
Parents of 545 Immigrant Children Separated at the Border Can’t Be Found
We begin with the 545 children stuck in ICE detention camps whose parents the government cannot find, most of them having been deported as a result of Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s “zero tolerance” policies on the border. Lee Gelernt, a professor at Columbia Law School and the Deputy Director of the ACLU’s National Immigrants’ Rights Project who is currently the lead attorney on the ACLU’s family separation case Ms. L v. ICE joins us. We discuss the cruelty our government is engaged in having separated young children, often as babies, from their parents then farming them out
to relatives of foster families. Meanwhile many other children are bing held in detention camps where they grow up motherless and fatherless in the custody of contract workers from politically-connected companies who received lucrative contracts from the Trump Administration to warehouse people for profit with no end in sight.
As More Democrats Vote in Texas, Voter Suppression Ramps Up
Then we look into the flagrant voter suppression attempts going on in and around Houston where record voting is taking place but where the Harris County Republican Party along with the A.G. of Texas are suing to invalidate drive-thru voting after the Republican Governor of Texas restricted drop-off boxes to one per county. Mary Jane Mudd, the President of the League of Women Voters of Houston, Texas joins us to discuss the convenience and safety of drive-thru voting and whether 60,000 drive-thru votes can be arbitrarily invalidated.
Challenging Our Foundational Myths to Make Us More Clear Eyed and Patriotic
Then finally we speak with Jared Yates Sexton, a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University and author of the new book, just out, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World But Failed Its People. We discuss the foundational myths at the heart of our collective American imagination
which Sexton lays bare with radical candor meant to make us more clear-eyed and patriotic.
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