NeverTrump Mike Hayden: Trump’s Border Policy Like Nazi Slave-Labor Camp

Hayden
MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S. government’s policy detaining migrant parents while sheltering their children elsewhere is reminiscent of Adolf Hitler’s slave-labor camps, according to a Tweet from former intelligence chief and NeverTrump activist Gen. Michael Hayden.

Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005, and was CIA director from 2006 to 2009, Tweeted an image of the entrance to the Birkenau slave-labor camp, with the comment “other governments have separated mothers and children.”

So far, Trump’s policy is sheltering roughly 2,000 children in facilities away from their detained parents.

In contrast, Hitler’s wars killed roughly 30 million people and smashed up numerous countries.

The Birkenau slave-labor camp was located near the Auschwitz killing center, and it housed the laborers who were used to distill fuel and build ammunition. Many of the laborers were killed by the brutal work and guards.

The shelters for the migrants’ children, however, are different from Birkenau, according to journalists who have visited several of the shelters:

Hayden sent out a stream of Tweets defending his Nazi comparison while he was also recommending his favorite wines to other Twitter users.

Hayden’s Tweet was cheered by other NeverTrump activists, including former GOP consultant John Weaver. He has worked as a political consultant for various pro-migration GOP politicians, including Sen. John McCain, Jon Huntsman, and Gov. John Kasich.

Hayden’s Nazi claim is commonplace among left-wing activists who are eager to make political hay from Trump’s refusal to let migrants use their children to get past U.S. border rules.

Under the 1997 Flores legal settlement, officials cannot detain parents with children for more than 20 days. This rule means border officials are forced to release migrants pending their eventual court hearing — if the migrants bring children with them.

Many migrants are rationally bringing their children with them to exploit the Flores loophole.

Attorney General Jeff Session is trying to change the incentives for migrants, many of whom borrow money in the hope of earning more money by working long hours in the U.S. underground economy. The debt is often owed to the Mexican criminal cartels, who charge huge tolls as migrants try to sneak across the border. The migration flow is very large — more than 400,000 migrants held work-permits in 2017 while waiting for asylum hearings.

But Sessions’ policy may change the migrants’ incentives. If they cannot get to jobs to pay their debts because of Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy, the next wave of migrants may quit their migration.

Wealthy Democrats are trying to shame ordinary Americans into opening their borders to poor migrants.

“We should be very blunt: The biggest tool we have is shame,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said at a June 14 press conference on Capitol Hill. He said:

We need to shame this administration into changing an inhumane, un-American policy because it is totally unprecedented … It is not required by law, it is unprecedented in recent history — it was not done under the previous administration —  [and] it is creating thousands of detainees.

Many progressives are using the new policy to overtly or subtly portray Trump and border officials as Nazis.

“Send them to the camps,” said Philip Gourevitch, a writer at The New Yorker:

MSNBC personality Chris Hayes retweeted another activist’s portrayal of Trump’s policy as a “Holocaust.”

The top editor at Vox.com top retweeted and validated another Nazi reference by Hayes:

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1007164666483789824

The top editor at The New Yorker’ reprised the ‘We were following orders’ claim used by Nazi officials to defend their killings:

 

https://twitter.com/winterjessica/status/1006879985859289089

Immigration lawyer David Leopold updated a quote from an anti-Nazi pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Feminist website Wonkette compared the Central American migrants to Jews fleeing the Nazis’ genocidal policy:

 

A pro-migration website portrayed Trump’s aide, Steve Miller, as Hitler’s propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels.

TV host Rosie O’Donnell portrayed Miller as “baby Hitler.”

Phil Klinkner, a professor at Hamilton College, used the detention-and-housing dispute to portray Trump and his supporters as Nazis.

 

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