Philip Rosmarin

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

There’s an old saying among criminal prosecutors:

“If you want to put someone in a box you’ve got to think outside the box.”

Federal prosecutors tried to think way outside the box last year when they arrested an Arizona State University instructor whose crime was to give food and water to immigrants who had crossed the Arizona border.

Last month at the conclusion of Scott Warren’s trial, jurors scratched their heads and said they just didn’t get it. ’Twas a hung jury. Now the government vows to try him again.

Warren and two of the immigrants he helped were arrested during a raid upon a building long known to Border Patrol agents as a humanitarian way station run by a group called No Más Muertes (No More Deaths). The group offers people food, water, beds, and clean clothes. It was established to try to curb the more than eight thousand deaths of desperate people that have occurred in the Sonoran Desert migration corridor, near the town of Ajo, since the 1990s.

No Más Muertes doesn’t smuggle people, doesn’t do anything to help them get into the United States. Doesn’t do anything but save lives. Warren’s arrest came within hours after the organization showed video evidence of Border Patrol agents destroying life-saving water stations and confiscating blankets.

The government charged Warren with illegally harboring the two immigrants and conspiracy to smuggle them into the United States. He faced twenty years in prison.

This was completely out-of-the box thinking, considering the immigrants were already in the United States when Warren met them. The agents testified that Warren made wavy gestures with his arms and hands in their presence that indicated he was “pointing to known points of interest.”

Very creative. Very out of the box. But in the jury box, out of their minds.

The government is dropping the conspiracy charge, but plans to retry Warren in November for his effrontery in providing food, water, beds, and clean clothes. Hey, in Donald Trump’s America, we don’t even give that stuff to the illegal kids.

Since Warren’s arrest, eighty-eight more bodies have been recovered from the Ajo corridor.

Ajo, indeed.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

This is how we treat immigrant children — hundreds and hundreds of immigrant children — in the America Donald Trump has made great again:

First we separate them from their parents, or whatever family member brought them in search of a better life. We pretend they are better off alone than staying with people who, if we can’t prove they are criminals now, we’ll get around to it.

By our own law, we put them in “safe and sanitary facilities,” like the one in Clint, Texas, visited last week by lawyers, doctors, and interpreters appalled by what they saw. Three hundred and fifty children were crammed into a detention center designed to hold no more than a hundred and four adults. Our benevolent government recently added a giant, windowless warehouse where we planned to keep five hundred more. Amazing what wonders we can accomplish when we treat people like roaches.

The observers told The New Yorker magazine they discovered untreated flu and lice outbreaks; children covered in filth inside and outside their clothing sleeping on cold concrete floors. Guards wore masks to protect themselves from the stench. Children as young as seven were the only caretakers for infants and toddlers they first met when guards handed them off saying, take care of these kids, will ya?

By our own law, we are to keep them there no more than seventy-two hours in this “temporary” housing. Children have been kept there for weeks.

Children wore shirts stained and wet with mucus, food, and breast milk — some of the children were mothers with children of their own.

As appalling as these conditions, was the brazen hubris of the government “caretakers.” Though they had been told three weeks in advance of the observers’ visit, children were unshowered, or had been allowed to shower only a day or two before the lawyers arrived. Toothbrushes were unavailable, and government lawyers later told incredulous judges toothbrushes and soap were unnecessary luxuries of “safe and sanitary facilities.”

It may not be fair to expect humane or caring treatment of this particular population of immigrant children, from this particular Administration.

By this Administration’s definition, if they are brown-skinned or black-skinned or any-skinned this side of Norway, they come from shithole countries and the dirty, shabby new holes we throw them into — while we decide how best to throw them back where they came from — are an upgrade for which they should be grateful.

An upstart Congresswoman of less than Norwegian complexion called places like this, concentration camps.

Government shills complain that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez implies (she doesn’t, but truth isn’t a player in this administration) that what they like to call summer camps are the same as Nazi concentration camps.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines a concentration camp as a “prison in which large numbers of nonmilitary prisoners are kept…in extremely poor conditions.”

These children are confined in large numbers and prevented from escaping. These children are not soldiers. Only a government lawyer could argue, and his face not crack, that these children are kept in anything but extremely poor conditions.

These are concentration camps.

But good for you, Mr. President, your concentration camps are better than the Nazis’. You don’t kill children by gas or oven; you kill or wound them by neglect and animus.

A half-dozen immigrant children yearning to breathe free American air have already stopped breathing altogether in our care under our President’s so-called watch.

How many deaths of these children will it take till Americans force him actually to open his eyes?

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

If at first you don’t succeed, here are Alabama’s favorite idiot son’s best excuses to try, try again:

10. He’ll show Congresswoman Frederica Wilson how a real cowboy wears her hat.

9. High hopes to wave his tiny little pistol around at the speakers’ podium. Maybe even take out his handgun.

8. With Donald Trump, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh, would form perfect Sad Survivors of Sexual Assault/Harassment Accusations Support Group.

7. Social Security just ain’t gettin’ the job done.

6. Alabama keeps taking away his other day job.

5. Can’t wait to try that thumb thing John McCain did.

4. Heard U.S. Senators get complimentary little blue pills.

3. Has important contributions to make to subjugate the inferior races.

2. Prized black velvet edition of the Ten Commandments would look just great on his Senate desk.

And the Number One Top Ten Reason Roy Moore Is Running for Senate Again?

1. Probably his last chance to score a Senate page.

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

I can’t think of a worse way to observe Memorial Day than by pardoning war criminals.

Yet that is what the commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States is making plans to do. He can’t risk his hair in the rain to visit the graves of our war dead, but if he can rehabilitate a few soldiers whose only crimes are that they murdered a few people who aren’t even white (women and girls maybe, boys and old men, but not white), he’s ready to party.

First up for pardon is a man who hasn’t even been tried yet (hasn’t stopped the President from pardoning like-minded pals before). This man is a Navy SEAL turned in by seven other SEALs under his command in Iraq. Among other things, they witnessed him stab a defenseless teenage captive to death, use his sniper rifle to shoot a school-age girl and old man for target practice, and fire rockets and machine guns into neighborhoods for fun. He certainly sounds like he deserves a presidential pardon, at least from this president.

Other possible pardons are of a Blackwater contractor who massacred ten women, two kids, and two men who might have been an actual danger to him, had they been armed and known of his intentions; a soldier already hailed by Trump as a “U.S. Military hero,” who summarily executed a captive because he thought the man might make bombs for the Taliban; and a whole group of Marines shown on video urinating on the corpses of suspected Afghan fighters (not the President’s first involvement with a pee tape).

Are these the sort of heroic actions the president imagines he himself might have assayed but for the pesky (if imaginary) bone spurs that kept him out of military service?

What kind of man pardons war criminals? But then I’ve wondered this kind of thing before. What kind of man lies with nearly every breath he takes? What kind of man incites violence against political foes and journalists? What kind of man steals children at our southern border, cages them, lets them die in his custody?

Wait…we already know. Vladimir Putin’s kind of man.