They helped Trump win Michigan, then his immigration crackdown split their community


=------


“There’s a very good chance he won Michigan because of our community. We did trust President Trump to protect us.”

But just a few months later, Ashourina’s worst fears about what Trump’s election would mean for their Iraqi Christian family came true. On a hot Sunday in June, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents fanned out in the Detroit suburbs, picking up more than 100 Iraqi immigrants as they made their way home from churches or family lunches. One of them was Ashourina’s father.

When Warda Slewo reached a detention center in Ohio early the next morning, ICE allowed him a one-minute phone call. “Write this down,” he told his daughter. “They’re holding me in Youngstown. Don’t leave me.”


An automated voice chimed in the background, warning the two that they only had 10 seconds left to speak.

“Hey Dad,” Ashourina said, unable to help herself. “Do you still support Trump?”

She heard the sound of her dad cursing in Aramaic before the line went dead.

Ashourina’s pointed question to her 53-year-old father is one that’s reverberating through the close-knit Iraqi Christian community in southeastern Michigan, opening up painful rifts among families and old friends that could affect the 2020 presidential election in this crucial Midwestern state.

Trump captured the votes of many in this deeply religious enclave with his antiabortion stance, and dazzled them with his specific promise on the campaign trail to protect Christian minorities in the Middle East and crush the terrorist group ISIS. When Trump denigrated other immigrant groups, referring to Mexicans flooding across the border as “rapists” and calling for a total ban on Muslim immigration to the United States, some Iraqi Christians — who are also called Chaldeans, after the name of their branch of the Catholic Church — saw no threat to their community whose members largely entered the country legally.



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“There’s a very good chance he won Michigan because of our community,” said Nahren Anweya, an Iraqi-American Christian activist from southeast Michigan who enthusiastically backed Trump in 2016. “We did trust President Trump to protect us.”

Warda Slewo shocked his Bernie Sanders-supporting daughter when he began singing Trump’s praises a few months before the election, after previously seeming not to care about the presidential race at all.

“Suddenly one day my dad is telling me, ‘He promises to protect the Christians and he’s a businessman, he can help the economy,’ ” Ashourina recalled. “I was dumbfounded.”

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Ironically, it was Trump’s idea for a Muslim ban, a notion some Iraqi Christians quietly supported, that ultimately led to that wave of deportations that swept away many in the community.

“Those that were expressing these ideas [in support of the Muslim ban] were literally digging graves for the Muslim community and we fell into it,” Ashourina said.

http://apps.bostonglobe.com/nation/politics/2019/10/voters-2020-election/michigan/madison-heights/

https://twitter.com/nytmike/status/1183542736143732736

NEW: The video showed the president as a mass shooter executing members of the media and his political opponents in a church. It was played at a pro Trump conference at the Trump resort in Miami last week. w/
@maggieNYT

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-13/after-times-investigation-lapd-to-make-major-changes-to-elite-metropolitan-division

LAPD will drastically cut back on pulling over random vehicles over racial bias concerns

In a major shift prompted by a Times investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department’s elite Metropolitan Division will drastically cut back on pulling over random vehicles, a cornerstone of the city’s crime-fighting strategy that has come under fire for its disproportionate impact on black and Latino drivers.

LAPD Chief Michel Moore told The Times that Metro’s vehicle stops have not proven effective, netting about one arrest for every 100 cars stopped, while coming at a tremendous cost to innocent drivers who felt they were being racially profiled.

Metro crime suppression officers, who number about 200, will instead track down suspects wanted for violent crime and use strategies other than vehicle stops to address crime flare-ups ranging from burglaries to shootings.

“Is the antidote or the treatment itself causing more harm to trust than whatever small or incremental reduction you may be seeing in violence?” Moore said on Thursday. “And even though we’re recovering hundreds more guns, and those firearms represent real weapons and dangers to a community, what are we doing to the tens of thousands of people that live in those communities and their perception of law enforcement?”


The changes, which take effect in late November, were hailed by community leaders who were critical of the LAPD’s stop strategies. But the union that represents rank-and-file Los Angeles police officers said Moore had left the residents of South L.A. vulnerable to being preyed on by criminals.

The Times investigation, published in January, showed that Metro officers stopped African American drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the city’s population.

Nearly half the drivers stopped by Metro were black, in a city that is 9% black, according to the analysis.

Even in South L.A., where most residents are black or Latino, the percentage of black drivers stopped by Metro was twice their share of the population, the analysis found.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/13/us/chicago-shooting/index.html


A neighbor is in custody after he shot five people -- four of them fatally -- in an apartment building in Chicago, police said.

The shooting happened Saturday night and a weapon has been recovered from the scene, according to Tom Ahern, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department.

The suspect -- a 67-year-old retired construction worker -- allegedly shot the victims as they were eating inside a residence, CNN affiliate WGN reported, citing police.

"When he walked into that neighbor's apartment, there were four people at the table eating dinner," First Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio said. "For reasons we don't yet know, he opened fire and killed them."

After the shooting at the dinner table, the man allegedly went upstairs and shot a woman, who was hospitalized in critical condition, the affiliate reported.

The suspect is a neighbor who is known to the victims, Ahern said.

https://twitter.com/NancyOsborne180/status/1183369141119533057

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EGwr6jfX0AUl929?format=jpg&name=medium

Trump orders withdrawal of U.S. forces from northern Syria, days after Pentagon downplays possibility


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-orders-withdrawal-of-us-forces-from-northern-syria-days-after-pentagon-downplays-possibility/2019/10/13/83087baa-edbb-11e9-b2da-606ba1ef30e3_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_us-syria-11am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of virtually all U.S. forces from northern Syria in the face of a Turkish military offensive targeting Kurdish fighters in the region, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said Sunday, after days of assurances from the Pentagon that the United States was not “abandoning” its partners in the campaign against the Islamic State.

The order to remove the troops came toward the end of a chaotic day in which the viability of the U.S. mission in Syria rapidly unraveled after Turkish troops and their Syrian rebel proxies advanced deep into Syrian territory and cut U.S. supply lines.

U.S. troops were forced to abandon a base in the town of Ain Issa on Sunday morning as the Turkish-led forces approached, a U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The Turkish-backed fighters seized control of the nearby highway, establishing checkpoints and severing the main U.S. supply line to the western portion of territory held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led alliance that helped the United States defeat the Islamic State.

https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1183450150200643584

Trump supporters “want to return this country to the white Christian country that they believe it should be again. They don’t want the diversity, and they follow him for this, but they’re not the country. We are a diverse people” – Sam Donaldson on CNN’s

https://twitter.com/BrentHBaker/status/1183436277833748481

https://twitter.com/kurdistannews24/status/1183357811775823872

while Trump golfs and collects $$ from properties in Turkey


Kurdish Human right activist & The secretary-general of the Future Syria Party,Ms #Hervin_Khalaf ,has been raped & then stoned to death by #Turkey backed Jihadists near #Hasakah during Turkey's ethnic cleansing operation against #Kurds in Syria.

https://twitter.com/kurdistannews24/status/1183209744384704512