“You don’t have to be a total genius to figure this out… even though I am a genius.”
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Donald Trump was wearing the Darth Vader mask instead of Anakin Skywalker? Probably not. But someone else did, and they decided to do something about it. YouTubers the Auralnauts dubbed some of Darth Vader’s best Star Wars scenes with REAL Donald Trump quotes. Is he more evil than Anakin?
In 2005, the DNA Fingerprint Act updated a former law‚ the DNA Identification Act of 1994, which denied authorities to obtain DNA from “arrestees who have not been charged in an indictment or information with a crime, and DNA samples that are voluntarily submitted solely for elimination purposes, from being included in the National DNA Index System.” In other words, the DNA Fingerprint Act was revised to protect the privacy rights of immigrants. In 2010, the DNA Fingerprint Act was again revised because of then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who said government agencies didn’t have the resources back then to gather DNA from “migrants in custody who weren’t facing criminal charges or those pending deportation proceedings,” so another clause was put in place for them. Now, in another move in the attack on migrants, the Trump Administration wants to change that.
The Trump Administration is continuing forward with its push to collect DNA samples from every migrant person that enters the U.S.
Credit: @nytimes / Twitter
According to the New York Times, “a homeland security official said in a call with reporters on Wednesday that the exemption [put in place in 2010] was outdated, and that it was time to eliminate it.” That statement means the government now has resources to sort through and gather DNA, which it didn’t have in 2010. But that assumption is a stark contradiction since border agents, and immigration officials are severely understaffed.
Immigration advocates are calling foul on this tactic by the Trump Administration who continues to criminalize migrants who are seeking asylum. Once their DNA is in the system, they will forever be recorded as felons.
Credit: @jherrerx / Twitter
“That kind of mass collection alters the purpose of DNA collection from one of criminal investigation basically to population surveillance, which is basically contrary to our basic notions of a free, trusting, autonomous society,” Vera Eidelman, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told The New York Times.
The government began collecting DNA from migrants starting this summer.
Credit: @CREWcrew / Twitter
At some point, this summer border agents began collecting DNA from migrants in order to verify whether or not they were related to the people they were traveling with. Agents were trying to prove whether family units entering the country together were actually related or traveling under false information. The DNA they gathered at the point was just to show family DNA.
“This was really an investigative tool in attacking the fraudulent family phenomenon,” an ICE official said to CNN about the operation that began this summer. “We’re interested in using this as a tactical law enforcement tool, one of many, to be deployed when looking at a potential fraudulent family scenario.”
This new type of DNA that the administration is aiming to get would provide more extensive information and also would not be shared with other law enforcement agencies.
Credit: @YouGovUS / Twitter
The problem here lies with privacy concerns. For example, if an immigration official gathers DNA information from a migrant who entered the country illegally only to be given asylum later — because the court process takes a very long time — that person, who has the option of becoming a U.S. citizen at some point now has a criminal stain on their record for the rest of their life.
Writer Kelly Hayes wrote an extensive Twitter thread that exposes the extensive damage and intrusion this form of DNA gathering will have for years to come.
Credit: @kejames / Twitter
“A DNA registry for migrants,” Hayes tweeted. “Imagine the ugly possibilities of having a marginalized group of people that large cataloged according to their DNA, and that catalog being in the hands of the state. I know folks are focused on Ukraine, but this is a whole thing. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, including children. With evolving technologies, the potential surveillance applications of a massive DNA registry are ominous AF.”
It’s unclear when this DNA collection will officially begin, even though the New York Times reports that Homeland Security officials have already said they have the right to get DNA from migrants. However, the Supreme Court has already ruled undocumented people have rights just as U.S. citizens do.
“Though the Supreme Court has found that the constitutional right to privacy applies to everyone within the United States, regardless of their immigration status, a more restrictive interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has been applied within a 100-mile zone of the border, where suspicionless searches are allowed, even of American citizens,” the Times reports. And yet we already know some attorneys are trying to fight that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to undocumented people.
He has done it again. President Donald Trump’s Twitter is a gift that keeps on giving… us something to talk about. Trump went on a Tweet sesh, expressing his racist rhetoric, yet again.
Only this time, the attack came in the form of a poorly translated meme-like image that has the Internet shook.
Days after campaigning in New Mexico, a 50% Latino state that republicans haven’t been able to secure since George W. Bush’s presidential election, Trump sent his first Spanish-language Tweet ever.
The graphic, which he tweeted out, depicts Trump standing in front of a border wall, and a frown on his face. It reads “NO MÁS” in big bold letters. The usual anti-immigration rhetoric, however, provided some comedy on this occasion. I mean, does the President of the United States really rely on Google Translate to share a message in a different language? We’ll never know for sure. But a first-grade teacher could tell you, that using a robot to translate a human language, will definitely result in an unreliable source.
The auto-translate feature never fails…to fail. So should we even be surprised that not one person in the Trump administration could help to properly translate his insults? Given that it’s a language that the president obviously doesn’t speak and which he knows will make his bigoted white followers uncomfortable, the answer is… yeah, no. As 2020 approaches we can unfortunately expect more of these kind of messages as he prompts his followers into a white panic, relying on the ignorance of his fans. Clearly, the president will be doubling down on the hate that helped him get elected in the first place.
The xenophobic image, in which he was trying to say: “No more fake asylum”, “No more catch and release”, and “No more illegal entry into the United States” stated his usual discourse, and we get what he’s trying to say. But if you’re going to come after people, can’t you at least get someone competent to look over your copy?
Meanwhile, in New Mexico, the president tried his best to appeal to Latinx voters during his rally. And it got weird. At one point, Trump made a comment on how “white” one of his key Latino surrogates looks. “He happens to be Hispanic, but I’ve never quite figured it out because he looks more like a WASP than I do…But I’ll tell you what — there is nobody that loves this country more or Hispanic more than Steve Cortes,” Trump said. Cortes is a Trump supporter and TV commentator, as well as a member of Trump’s Advisory Council.
“Nobody loves the Hispanics more!” Trump continued, before asking Cortes “Who do you like more, the country or the Hispanics?”
Suggesting that Latinos have dual loyalties.
Trump remarks on how white Steve Cortes looks for being Hispanic, then bizarrely asks him, "Who do like more — the country or the Hispanics? He says the country … I may have to go for the Hispanics to be honest … we love our Hispanics." #wutpic.twitter.com/W37pDuKL12
His answer though was pure gold: “I may have to go for the Hispanics to be honest with you…We love our Hispanics”
After the president tweeted the “NO MÁS” image, Twitter exploded with anger, but more so with mockery. Twitter users dragged the president’s intelligence, pointing out that he doesn’t speak a word of Spanish — and are not even sure that he masters English tbh (remember covfefe-gate?), others simply condemned his flat-out racism.
Here for your entertainmnent is a roundup of just a few of the internet’s best reactions to the #GoogleTranslateFail.
After a lifetime of watching ‘Inglés sin Barreras’ commercials, it’s about time someone made ‘Español sin Barreras’… and sent a copy to the White House.
