a "face eating party wasn't supposed to eat my face story" MI Iraqis voted Trump, now deportations

[Demovictory9]

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


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“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/

[EndGOPPropaganda]

1. Good for her. Politics is real life. It's people's lives. We shouldn't shrink from talking politics

[Leith]

2. They thought that he would attack the people they hated

and they never realized that agent orange considered them no different.

huh... Go figure.

Who's next? Cubans for being too much like Mexicans and Puerto Ricans? There's a possibility.

[Blue_true]

3. Cubans currently are too important to republicans in Florida.

They will be handled with kids gloves by republicans until they aren't important to Republican Party electoral prospects.

[Jake Stern]

4. Fuck 'em

They voted with their hate and now they reap the rewards.

Shit happens.

[Crunchy Frog]

5. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

[irisblue]

6. From article

.snip--.."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."

Snip--"The latter community is in Macomb County, which is known for swinging between Democrat and Republican in presidential elections. It swerved from Barack Obama in 2012 to backing Trump in 2016 by a 16-point margin. Influential Chaldeans claim that it was their community’s vote that made the difference for Trump, who won Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. As the president seeks reelection while facing a rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry in the House, he needs to maintain that narrow edge to win again.

Snip--She found free representation for her father through a nonprofit legal aid group set up by two Chaldean lawyers, Nadine Yousif and Nora Youkhana, and the American Civil Liberties Union won temporary relief for many Iraqis with a class-action suit that included the Slewos. With help from donations and a loan from Michigan’s Chaldean community, Ashourina was able to pay a $15,000 bond to free her father nine months after he was detained. Warda Slewo is home, and awaiting his court date in 2022. And though, as a noncitizen, he can’t vote anyway, he’s lost all his former affection for Trump."

[llmart]

15. There's an awful lot of racism in Macomb County,...

a lot of it directed at the Chaldean community. I'll admit I hadn't even known what a "Chaldean" was before I moved from the South to Macomb County. I wasn't here more than a year before I heard that term said pejoratively out of the mouths of many a Macomb County resident. So, I am not surprised that many voters flocked to Trump. His racism knows on bounds. You don't have to be black for he and his supporters to despise you. Their racism is towards anyone not as lily white as they are.

[keithbvadu2]

7. Wrong kind of Christians.

Wrong kind of Christians.

[Garrett78]

8. "We did trust Trump" is a phrase that will never compute.

Like the people who say, "He tells it like it is."

No, you morons, he tells it like it isn't. He's famous for lying. He's the epitome of the answer to the joke about how you can tell when a politician is lying.

No, not in hindsight. He has long been famous for lying. Trump is synonymous with lying. How fucking ignorant does one have to be to actually think Trump is telling the truth? That's a special kind of ignorance. I would have an easier time accepting a fully functioning adult who believes in Santa Claus than someone who believes Trump is trustworthy. Jesus H Christ on a stick.

[Collimator]

9. When people say that Trump "tells it like it is". . .

What they mean is that he doesn't speak with the political delicacy characteristic of most politicians.

Part of me does understand the longing for someone who answers a simple question with a simple "yes" or "no". But Trump doesn't answer questions at all. He strings together words that get him through whatever given situation until he can escape.

Where he "tells it like it is" is in situations where he isn't answering questions but rather reeling off rhetoric to feed the fears and resentments of his base. "Telling it like it is" means telling people what they want to hear.

The opposite side of the coin is politicians dancing around any firm statement because they don't want to offend anybody who might vote for them.

[Garrett78]

10. "...means telling people what they want to hear." Yep.

And what they want to hear is that it's perfectly fine to think and spew racist and sexist bullshit. "Political correctness" means basic human decency. Can't have that.

They've convinced themselves that what they believe is true, because their brains won't allow them to accept that they're simply deplorable people.

[stopdiggin]

12. sounding a little bit like

a rationalization for Trump appeal. You might be right -- but first I have to head over to the weeds and heave up my dinner. While there is no denying there is (or was) some sort of appeal there .. I've always just taken the much simpler explanation that people kind of liked him because he was an uncouth lout and a braying jackass. Let's not guild the lily here. Trump won almost exclusively because he insulted, taunted, threatened, bragged, lied, smeared and dog whistled his way straight through to the finish line. People might want to TELL you they saw a straight shooter ... But they must have seen it somewhere in between the racism, the taunts and the lies.

[stopdiggin]

11. little or no sympathy (for any Trump voter)

will offer this .. at least some of these voters appear to have a coherent "idea" of why they were supporting Trump (misguided as that might seem to me). I think I'd have to take that over the "lock her up" or "just can't trust her" crowd. People who have no real idea of what they're voting for period. I guess there's both brainless suckers -- and then f*ckwad sh*t for brains.

(but, I mean, really -- if you voted for Trump and then members of your family are getting deported .. HaHaHaHaHaHaHa ... Oh, man! Oh, lordy! Too much!)

[RhodeIslandOne]

13. TFB

Too Fucking Bad

[HAB911]

14. Thoughts and Prayers