On border security, Seth Meyers talks to a journalist who—unlike Trump—has actually been to the border
Hey, remember how the Trump administration is locking kids in fucking cages? It’s been a week where the signature Trump strategy of swamping yesterday’s hateful, ludicrous, racist, unstable, dangerous gibberish with a new day’s fresh presidential toilet tweets about, say, nuking millions of people, has proved effective in distracting everybody. But, as Seth Meyers posited on last night’s Late Night, the whole “locking kids in fucking cages” national disgrace is still worth a guest booking or two. So Meyers invited MSNBC’s Jacob Soboroff to the show on Monday, as the journalist has been his network’s embedded border correspondent since even before Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, and the rest of those wacky “zero tolerance” baby-snatchers started throwing kids in fucking cages.
Soboroff, armed with those pesky facts that Trump supporters have been taught to call “fake news,” first explained how Trump’s pet Game of Thrones wall is both useless (since the overwhelming majority of drug running and illegal immigration takes place at ports of call and not through scary Mexican gang members trudging through the desert), and unnecessary. Having walked, as Meyers said, “every mile of the U.S.-Mexico border” in his reporting, Soboroff painted a very different picture of life there than the lawless wasteland with whose Fury Road horror stories Trump likes to scare the rest of white America. “The president knows this,” explained Soboroff of Trump’s persistent, racist hyperbole, “It’s in the DEA reports that he gets.”
Moving on to the fact that the Trump administration still has kids locked in fucking cages (despite its own self-imposed, PR-driven Thursday deadline to reunite those caged kids with their families), Soboroff summed up the policy and its half-baked cruelty succinctly. “Basically, they make policies that rip children away from their families and are truly ripping apart the fabric of society,” stated Soboroff, “based on nonsense.” Calling his visits to several of the detention centers where, just to be clear, kids are being kept in fucking cages, “one of the most harrowing experiences as a father of a young kid … that I have ever seen in my life,” Soboroff told Meyers that the ongoing separation of families at the border is “a crisis on the scale of a natural disaster that was man-made by the Trump administration.” (You know, unlike that crisis caused by an actual natural disaster that this administration continues to perpetuate.)
Noting that he ran into former White House spokes-liar Sean Spicer in the NBC hallways (“I’m sorry,” deadpanned Meyers), Soboroff related how Spicer’s reported regret over the policy (again, of locking kids in fucking cages) came not from any sort of moral outrage (over locking kids in fucking cages), but from how the heartless deterrent tactics weren’t better implemented. That fact—you know, that a group of racists tore thousands of families apart on an indifferently concocted whim—will, according to Soboroff, mean that “over a third” of those children will never be reunited with their families. Just something to keep in mind during the next round of outrages.