Rachel Maddow Exposes Trump For Using Military Funds To Prosecute Migrant Families

Rachel Maddow broke some significant news on the immigration front on Wednesday night, exclusively reporting that the Department of Justice is sending active duty military lawyers to the border to prosecute migrant families.

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The MSNBC anchor said it’s a sign of just how unprepared the administration was for the consequences of their inhumane immigration policy.

“The military budget is, by this program, effectively being repurposed and diverted into Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice to help him handle this new huge backlog of immigration prosecutions that they’ve just created,” Maddow said.

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Maddow explains what the Justice Department move means:

What this means, among other things, is that the military budget, the defense budget, which pays for, you know, bombs and guns and ammo and all that stuff and the salaries of active duty military personnel. The military budget is, by this program, effectively being repurposed and diverted into Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice to help him handle this new huge backlog of immigration prosecutions that they’ve just created because of the Trump administration policy, for which they apparently made no plans in terms of how they were actually going to implement it. They didn’t bother to staff up more prosecutors to do this kind of prosecuting work. They just decided that they’d start prosecuting everybody, wholesale, with no plan for who would actually do the work. So now the military is helping them out? Active duty? I mean, to be clear, these military lawyers are not being assigned to represent parents who had their kids taken away or kids who had their parents taken away. They are being assigned to the Justice Department to prosecute those families. Legal representation for the families themselves, for the parents and for the kids, that’s not something where the U.S. military is being asked to take up the slack. No, that’s more of a GoFundMe situation.

The administration is using the military budget to go after migrant families

Despite the president’s move on Wednesday to rid himself of the immigration backlash, the administration is showing no signs of slowing down their assault on these migrant families.

Shortly after Trump signed his empty executive order to supposedly reunite families, it was reported that there is no real plan in place to reunite those who have already been ripped apart.

And for the families that do remain together, they will be indefinitely placed in what amount to detention centers.

Now, as Maddow reported on Wednesday, the Trump administration is using the military budget – the same one we use to bomb terrorists and wage wars – to go after these families.

Instead of treating them humanely – these families are escaping violence in their own countries, after all – the Trump administration is ratcheting up their efforts against them.

Trump didn’t solve the border crisis with his empty executive order on Wednesday. It’s still as bad as ever.

Sean Colarossi

Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.