On AM Joy, this morning, her guests discussed the confluence of natural disaster with a political disaster: Hurricane Barry and Donald Trump. Hurricane Barry made landfall in Louisiana this morning, and Trump announced that on Sunday, ICE would be sweeping up and arresting immigrants for deportation.
Elie Mystal applauded the mayors of targeted cities, and activists who are doing all they can to help the migrants, but rightly called these actions "terror attacks." I mean, let's call a thing a thing, okay? That's what they are. He also pointed out that the ONLY thing that will stop Trump are the white people who voted for him. SING IT, SISTER I mean, *cough* this is on US, white people. We need to fix it.
Mystal mentioned, though, where the cruelty of Trump intersected with the cruelty of nature, because some of the people targeted are also the people bracing for this hurricane. "You have to kind of shelter in place. You have to try to ride this storm out because it's coming."
Then Reid asked Mustafa Santiago Ali, Vice President of the National Wildlife Federation, about that very confluence.
ALI: How this policy is actually anchoring people in danger. So there are ten cities that the i.c.e. Raids are supposed to be happening at. One of them was New Orleans and then they sort of rescinded that for a quick second, and the other one is Houston. If you're a mother with a child and you are being impacted from the floodwaters or from this hurricane and you are in New Orleans, you probably won't go to a facility because you may be afraid your child might be taken away, you might be taken away. And for those folks when we went through Katrina, many people went to Houston to escape. So Houston is on that list also. So if the storm impacts Houston and people are migrating in that direction, or even if it doesn't and people are trying to escape there, then they may also now be in the crosshairs of the trump administration with these ice raids.
REID: So you have to decide, Marielena, whether you want to live or survive potentially deadly flooding or take a risk of losing your child for trying to save your child from deadly flooding.
After setting up that tragic choice, Reid's other guest made a slip for the ages, though it was absolutely perfect.
"Absolutely. I would agree completely. This is about a terror of rain, I mean a reign of terror under this administration..." declared Marielena Hincapie. And the second terror should never, ever have been in a position to reign in the first place.
