The Caravan & The Wall: Fact Versus Trump's Fiction

Weary Central American refugees from the "Caravan"
lining up at a soccer field in Mexico    [Photo - AP]

As an American raised to believe in the idea of a country that welcomes refugees seeking safety and freedom from violence or political persecution within our borders, it's not easy living with a president who promotes lies and fiction over the truth.

It's been hard enough seeing the images of hundreds of Central American refugees making their way north through Mexico in what's being described as a "caravan" in an effort to flee violence and destabilized government authority in their homeland to seek asylum in the U.S.

It's difficult to even imagine the kinds of circumstances and human suffering that would compel people to pack up only what they can carry, take their children and start a treacherous journey hundreds of miles north on foot just for a chance to enter the U.S. to join family members already here, or apply for residency or asylum.

Donald Trump's efforts this past week to seize on their plight and use it as some kind of media prop to ruthlessly cultivate anti-immigrant hysteria in order to selfishly promote his politically-dead-in-the-water border wall, is low even by his almost nonexistent standards.

None were lower than his attempts to resurrect, exonerate and defend his widely-condemned 2016 claims that Mexican migrants were "rapists" - which he used to kick off his presidential campaign.

As was widely reported, during off-script remarks last Thursday, Trump made the absurd claim that women in the caravan "are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before".

Unsubstantiated claims which even drew criticism from the likes of former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who himself was famously fired for repeated sexual harassment. 

WH Press Secretary defending Trump's made-up
claims of a fictional mass rape of refugees 

Trump seemed oddly unaware that the entire purpose of hundreds of refugees banding together in one large group was for their own security - to prevent such things from happening.

On Friday, when astonished journalists demanded an explanation from Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, (whose job now seems to entail defending and justifying Trump's almost non-stop lying) she cited a newspaper article on which her erratic boss based his bizarre claims of mass rape.

The article in question, an LA Times article published on Tuesday by Kate Linthicum, while referring to a 2010 kidnap and massacre of 72 Central American migrants in northern Mexico, mentioned that in Mexico, "Rapes, assaults and robberies of immigrants are common."

It said nothing about a single member of the current caravan being raped.

Let alone the fictional mass rapes Trump seemed to be referring to, without even having any first-hand information to back up his claims - a reflection for his utter disregard for the truth.

Kudos to CNN president Jeff Zucker for using his network's vast resources to try and fact-check Trump - take a look at this clip posted on DailyCaller.com of CNN's Leyla Santiago reporting live as some of the hundreds of Central American immigrants making their way north exit a bus that has brought them to the Mexican city of Puebla.

Where immigration personnel from the Mexican government as well as volunteer immigration legal experts from the U.S. were on hand to help advise the refugees on their status and options.

Some of the hundreds of people Trump tried to
paint as security threat 

Santiago asks a woman holding her child if any of the women in the caravan have been raped and she said none of the women have been assaulted. Not one.

Now that's not to suggest that border security isn't important.

But much of the current chaos is a direct result of Congressional Republicans blocking multiple attempts to pass comprehensive border legislation over the past decade.

It's not just U.S. domestic policy either.

Many of the hundreds of refugees in this caravan are from Honduras, where anger over the disputed election of the incumbent Juan Orlando Hernandez as president last November prompted a wave of criticism at the U.S. after the State Department (under former Sec. of State Rex Tillerson) sanctioned the elections despite widespread evidence of election fraud.

The Organization of American States announced the election results to be invalid as well.

Based in part on accusations that Hernandez had used his power to place his own supporters on Honduras' Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

The Tribunal declared Hernandez the winner over popular opposition challenger Salvador Nasralla by a margin of 1.66%

They also altered the Honduran constitution to allow Hernandez to run for a second term.

Opposition presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla
at a political rally in Tegucigalpa, Honduras 

Many Hondurans felt Nasralla had won the election and the results plunged parts of the country into violence as police cracked down on anti-Hernandez demonstrators - at least 24 demonstrators were killed by police.

The point is that the people in the caravan fleeing north were justifiably seeking asylum from the kind of authoritarian violence that has claimed so many innocent civilian lives in Central American countries like El Salvador or Nicaragua.

Yet Trump pronounced the refugees a security threat, and in yet another poorly-planned and seat-of-the-pants policy decision, used the caravan as an excuse to request that National Guard troops be deployed to the southern border for some kind of undefined mission until his precious wall is funded and built.

The silence from Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is deafening at this point.

It bears mentioning that there a couple things about Trump's lingering obsession about building a wall along the southern border between the U.S. and Mexico that are both fascinating and disturbing.

Let's start with the facts: as Susan Ferriss of the Center For Public Integrity reported on Wednesday, data from both the U.S. Border Patrol and the Pew Research Center clearly show that illegal border crossings from Mexico into the U.S. have been declining for years - in fact they're at a 50-year low.

Refugees cling to the side of a freight train heading
north through Mexico known as "The Beast"

So it's actually not surprising to watch Trump try and paint a caravan of hundreds of men, women and children from Central America openly making their way to the U.S. as some kind of invasion force.

There's a reason that both Republican and Democratic members of the House and Senate didn't allocate the tens of billions of dollars in the recent budget bill needed to undertake such a massive project.


Neither party wants to be associated with it, or pay for it because the facts show it isn't needed, won't actually be an effective deterrent to illegal border crossing and is politically unpopular.

Whether it's people clinging to the side of a freight train (pictured above) to make their way north through Mexico into the U.S., refugees will find a way to cross borders.

Second, the whole idea of the wall isn't based on some kind of sound policy analysis or strategic research cooked up by some think-tank.

The idea for the wall was one of many political themes first analyzed as part of test language used by the controversial data firm Cambridge Analytica as it explored themes that potential conservative voters for Trump would go for by presenting them to focus groups.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix and
co-founder Chistopher Wylie

As journalist Jason Le Miere reported in an article for Newsweek in March:

"The focus groups were also asked to respond to the idea of a border wall to prevent illegal immigration, as well as attitudes to race, including so-called 'race-realism', which trumpets the fact that races should be considered different from one another."

So the reality is that Trump's wall wasn't an idea developed by military strategists in the Defense Department.

It was one of the intentionally-divisive political wedge issues (including "draining the swamp") cooked up by Cambridge Analytica's data-crunchers as they looked for ways to sell Trump to American voters in 2016.

Who was one of the top executives at Cambridge Analytica when all this data was being harvested?

Former Trump campaign manager and senior White House advisor Steve Bannon.

So there's a reason Trump never stopped talking about the wall during the campaign, and was perfectly willing to flagrantly lie about mass rape of refugees last week in a desperate ploy to try and drum up for support for something the majority of American people don't want, and even Republicans have no intention of funding.

It's just a shame that outrage over Trump's concocted fiction seems to overshadow the brutal realities many of these caravan refugees are fleeing - and obscure the larger issue that Congress needs to get it's act together and come up with a way to draft and pass meaningful immigration reform.

Until then, the ever-more erratic Trump will continue to sew chaos where order is so desperately needed - and spread his fiction in an attempt to subvert facts that don't fit into his narrow ideology.