Border Separations: Voters Speak

Word cloud created from responses to the question asked of a sample of likely voters, What is the first word that comes to mind when you [read/hear] the following information from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: In recent months the U.S. Government has placed many young children into custody after separating them from their migrant parents at the border.

This Side of Shame

An article by Nick Miroff, Amy Goldstein and Maria Sacchetti in the Washington Post on the failure of this administration to reunite migrant families by the court imposed deadline--excerpted below at length--is detailed and enlightening, but perhaps necessarily does not state the basic inference.  For the "core" of this "debacle" is not management incompetence but the attitude that these migrants are not fully human, that their children are not people and that they are not families.  In fact, as the Post story points out, one agency involved designated them as "deleted families."

The racial and socioeconomic contempt is clear enough in the antipresident's own statements comparing migrants, including those seeking political asylum and fearing for their lives, to vermin.  As "criminals" who end up being charged with misdemeanors, they forfeit their humanity, and their children will pay for it the rest of their lives.

There are many crimes committed by this administration against this country (including the equivalent of treason) and against this planet.  This is a crime against humanity.  Other policies and actions were and are tragic.  This earns shame.

Incidentally, at this end of this story, one of the Homeland Security Advisory Council members who resigned in protest, and who called this policy "child kidnapping" is the same Elizabeth Holtzman who, as a Member of the US House from New York, served on the House Judiciary Committee that voted articles of impeachment for President Nixon in 1974.  I remember being impressed with her then, and told friends I hoped she would run for President.

Here are the Post article excerpts:

"Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.

After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.“

"There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said Friday at a court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”

"Most of those parents [picked up at the border] were charged with misdemeanors and taken to federal courthouses for mass trials, where they were sentenced to time served. By then, their children were already in government shelters. The government did not view the families as a discrete group or devise a special plan to reunite them, until Sabraw ordered that it be done."

"One result was that more than 400 parents were deported without their children."

"It is the act of separation from a parent, particularly with young children, that matters,” [Sabraw] told the government in court proceedings.

"On June 28, two days after Sabraw’s reunification order, DHS officials held a conference call for members of the DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, a group of security experts and former officials who provide recommendations and counsel to the secretary. One member, David A. Martin, said officials had few answers when dismayed members asked how they planned to bring families back together: “They were saying, ‘Well, we’re working on it.’ ” Two weeks later, he and three other members quit the panel in disgust.

In his resignation letter, Martin said the family separations were “executed with astounding casualness about precise tracking of family relationships — as though eventual reunification was deemed unlikely or at least unimportant.”

Another member who resigned, Elizabeth Holtzman, said the failure to create records to track parents and children demonstrated “utter depravity.”

“This is child kidnapping, plain and simple,” she wrote in her resignation letter, urging Nielsen to quit."

"The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit that led to Sabraw’s order, said it could take months to track down hundreds of deported parents and make arrangements to return their children. Some parents may be hard to reach or hiding from the very threats that prompted them to flee their countries in the first place.

In the meantime, the government will try to place their children with vetted guardians. Otherwise, they will remain in shelters.

“It’s going to be really hard detective work,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights Project. “Hopefully we will find them.”

US District Court Order: Find the Babies Now

On a day when the Supreme Court sanctified discrimination on the basis of religion by upholding Homegrown Hitler's Muslim country travel ban, a federal District Court ordered the government to reunite separated children with their parents, and to stop indiscriminate separation of families at the border.

Specifically the judge ordered that all children under 5 be reunited with their parents within 14 days, and all other children within 30 days.  Additionally, every child must be able to speak to a parent by telephone within 10 days.

The order was the result of a class action suit before a District Court in San Diego.  The judge, Dana Sabraw, was appointed by G.W. Bush.  The order read in part:

"The facts set forth before the court portray reactive governance — responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the government's own making," he wrote. "They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution."

Earlier in the day, seventeen states sued the federal government over the separations:

States are now seeking a court order to reunite families and end the separation practice by declaring it "contrary to the Constitution".  Tuesday's lawsuit states that Mr Trump's order does not mandate the end of family separation and says nothing about reuniting families who have already been separated.

It also calls the policy "an affront" to the states' interests in maintaining standards of care for children and preserving parent-child relationships. "The policy, and the administration's related conduct, has caused severe and immediate harm to the States and their residents."

Both suits cite laws insuring that children remain with their parents; taking children away requires due process.  They accuse the administration of breaking laws.

It's not clear what effect the San Diego order has on these suits brought by the states of California, Washington, Massachusetts, Delaware, Iowa, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia plus the District of Columbia.

Captive Families: The Suffering Has Not Ended

The administration has succeeded in getting their human rights abuses at the border off the front page.  A phony executive order (which few believe is even legal, let alone effective), a temporary suspension of arrests and imprisonments until new military concentration camps are built, and a few photos purporting to be of reunited families, have opened up media space to the usual trivia and a few other important stories, like the onrushing recession caused by the antipresident's tariffs by whim.

But the suffering has not ended.  The system is still in chaos, and the information flow is only slightly improved.  Stories abound that asylum seekers are being told that they will be reunited with their children only if they volunteering return to the central American country where (in many cases) their lives and the lives of their children are endangered.  And, some observe, there is no reason to believe these reunions will actually occur.

Meanwhile the military continues to build its tent cities concentration camps.  First person accounts emerge of horrible prison conditions, and even camp managers are speaking out about this stupid, cruel policy that is still harming children.

Immigration is turning out to be Homegrown Hitler's Big Lie of the year.  In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in the US are here legally.  Applying for political asylum is a legal process.  The proportion of the population comprised of illegal immigrants in the US is very low, about 3%.  Their share of the job market is the lowest in the western democracies.  Per capita, they commit fewer crimes in the US than white native born Americans.

Harley-Davidson isn't moving jobs to Europe because of immigrants into America. That company is doing so because of the antipresident's tariffs.  The racist hysteria that grips the R party is an adrenalin diversion, a pernicious denial.  And it is far from over.

Save the Children

Tuesday ended with the AP report that begins:

The Trump administration is reportedly operating three "tender age" detainment facilities in Texas, where undocumented babies and toddlers are sent after being forcibly separated from their parents.

The Associated Press reports that at least three facilities housing hundreds of children are already operational in Combes, Raymondville and Brownsville, Texas, while a fourth in Houston is being planned.

Also with a report of Rachel Maddow breaking down on air when trying to report on the AP's findings.

Several reports from the White House and elsewhere today said that the White House is delighted at the growing outrage because they see this only as a winning political issue with their base.  Meanwhile, normally articulate or at least blabbermouth politicians and reporters are practically speechless with horror at what is happening in America.

But Tuesday was also Juneteenth, the anniversary of the end of slavery in Texas and the Confederacy, celebrated as essentially the end of slavery in the US.  On this occasion, Jelani Cobb in the New Yorker noted that slavery had always entailed separating families and for an even longer period, selling African American children into slavery.  In other parts of the country--in California in particular--Native American slavery especially involved selling children.  And in a real sense, this practice has continued:

"Even the current system of child welfare reflects systematic biases regarding the removal of children from their parents’ homes. Black children were overwhelmingly more likely to be taken from their homes than white children, even when they faced problems of similar severity at home."

Now we are embroiled in controversy separating brown families and imprisoning toddlers, and possibly longer term exploitation.  This specifically is the responsibility of the current administration.  Cobb continues:

"On this Juneteenth, we have received the ambivalent blessing of clarity. We recognize the historic demise of an institution that justified the separating of parent from child in Texas only to see that phenomenon occur in a different time, under different circumstances, but with a similar trauma inflicted on children. The central value of history is to serve as inoculation against the stupidity, ignorance, and cruelties of the past. Yet the rearguard implications of Trumpism have been apparent since the day in June, 2015, when he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower and announced his Presidential campaign."

But as Helaine Olene writes in the Washington Post, children are more generally the victims of poor health care, education and poverty itself, as well as racial prejudice:  "Our politics reflects our almost inhuman ability to tolerate making children — especially poor and minority children — take it on the chin again and again."  And this is without even discussing school shootings and gun violence victims more generally--many of them children.

The plight of the children imprisoned at the border should broaden awareness on how often the insidious games adults play are paid for by the suffering of children, the maiming of lifetimes from a tender age.

Moves Toward the End Game

By complete coincidence, the United States just pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, a day after the head of it criticized the US policy of taking children from asylum-seekers at the border.

Meanwhile NBC News has an interview with a former director of the immigration police who confirms that due to poor record keeping and other bureaucratic problems, some separations may become permanent, leading to thousands of immigrant orphans.

Analysis of data performed by reporters for McClatchy news services suggests that US officials may have already lost track of some 6,000 unaccompanied migrant children.  Obviously this doesn't bode well for the children separated from their parents.

While AG Jeff Sessions unsuccessfully tried to dodge Nazi comparisons, Homegrown Hitler lived up to his name by asserting that migrants "infest" America.  He says America doesn't need more judges to decide asylum cases, it needs a Wall.  But the most chilling and portentous play from the Nazi playbook is his reported intention to accelerate his anti-immigrant venom and use it in his campaign rallies.  

Homegrown Hitler is right on track.  He's created chaos everywhere--in the federal system, the courts, the country, the world.  He's established a cult that consumed a former political party. He's got a police force in ICE.  And now he's set to motivate his xenophobic and racist base, in the guise of nationalism, with the twin tools of cruelty and demagoguery.  

The conventional wisdom would say this is a political effort to secure the base.  But that can't win elections, especially when no electoral college is involved.  But it is the Nazi playbook for an eventual dictatorship.  Can Brownshirts at the polling places be far behind?

Now that the political establishment is just about unanimously opposed to these family separations--and even one of the most dishonest and evil men in America, Mitch McConnell wants to pass a bill ending them--it will be interesting to see what Republicans catch on to the fact that Homegrown Hitler's efforts are basically separate from them, that he is building a Nazi Party within the Republican Party, and that's going to be increasingly evident in the coming months.

Don't Worry, It's Just "Alien Children"

Monday was the day that the issue of asylum-seeking families being torn apart by American border agents just exploded.  The current First Lady, and even more strongly and to the point, the four living former First Ladies publicly condemned the policy, beginning with a Washington Post oped and tweets by Laura Bush, joined by statements by Michelle Obama,  Rosalyn Carter and Hillary Clinton.

More voices on Capitol Hill condemned the policy, including Republicans--notably also not supporting the antipresident's lie that it is the law.  Even a partisan stiff like Senator Lindsay Graham said plainly that the antipresident could end it with a phone call.

The antipresident tweeted back, his press secretary dissed Laura Bush, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen lied about the policy while doubling down on it. In her White House press briefing, she continually referred to the children involved as "alien children."  That's what the blond lady said.

She claimed that only Congress can stop it--an assertion that could soon come back to haunt her or the administration.

Then came the release of audio from inside one of the intake centers, with the unforgettable voices of young children: a 6 year old pleading to call her aunt to come and get her, and an unknown children repeatedly calling for "Papi."  Reports described the children as "screaming" but this child was not screaming, she was utterly desperate.

As desperate as this moment was, health experts are talking about the future effects of such trauma and the imprisoning itself.  The characterization of the day by experts, reports and pundits was "child abuse."

But in addition to the political and humanitarian fury that dominated the news on Monday, there was actual new information--all of it portraying the situation in even worse terms.

New information confirmed that the pace of separations has increased to nearly 70 families a day.

Several news outlets reported that many if not all of these family separations are being forced on asylum-seekers--people escaping from being murdered by repressive governments and drug dealers (including those who own banks) in Central America.  Some brought children to save them from being forced into gangs by drug dealers.

They are legally entitled to apply for asylum, but border agents are stopping them from entering the US at official ports of entry so they can apply.  Consequently many are avoiding the official ports of entry to enter illegally so they have standing to apply for political asylum under US law.  It is at this point--after a long and dangerous journey escaping for their lives--that they are arrested and their children taken away.

Jonathan Blitzer in the New Yorker reported that the government has no plan or procedure for reuniting these families.  Others report that there appears to be no tracking of parents and children after they are separated to even know who the parents of the children are.

Another reporter who interviewed children released from a facility said that conditions were poor inside, and that children were stripped of all their possessions, including pieces of paper bearing the phone numbers of relatives in the US.

A shortage of qualified social workers and caregivers was reported.  A shortage of judges to hear the mounting cases of the parents is predicted.  A separate story this weekend said that because of this administration's shrinking-the-government cutbacks, there are dangerously few trained prison guards in federal prisons, with secretaries, teachers and other personnel drafted to guard prisoners.

There were reports of parents deported but their children left behind, and a report of a child who was told her parents might be deported and she might be abandoned.

There still have been few reporters or officials allowed into these facilities, and those who have are restricted in what pictures they can take, no film, and they haven't been permitted to speak with prisoners.  All of this would be permitted for--and demanded by-- a UN human rights visit of a POW camp.

Those camps that have been visited have all been for older boys.  A reporter asked Homeland Security chief Neilsen what is happening to the girls.  She said she didn't know.

There was a later report that some Members of Congress toured a "facility" where girls were imprisoned, along with toddlers and infants.  They witnessed one of the girls changing the diaper of an infant, because no one else would touch the baby.

America Is Imprisoning Children (Updated)

The United States of America is imprisoning children, after ripping them away from their mothers and fathers.  Here's how it is being done:

"According to public defenders, immigration agents told some parents that their children were being taken for a bath, or taken briefly for questioning. It took hours for parents to realize their children had really been taken away indefinitely."

Shades of the Nazis, offering a nice shower but delivering poison gas.

"Nick Miroff of the Washington Post revealed that one father died by suicide in a detention cell, the night after his 3-year-old had been physically ripped out of his arms.
According to CNN, one mother reported that her child had been taken from her while she was nursing. The mother claimed she was placed in handcuffs when she tried to protest."

Update 6/16: The government admits to taking nearly 2,000 children away from their parents in the first few weeks of the program, an average of 48 a day.  Some observers believe this is an undercount.   A Border Patrol chief says that the current rate could soon double.

A doctor who visited a shelter for young children was interviewed by the Washington Post:

"But the first child who caught the prominent pediatrician’s attention during a recent visit was anything but happy. Inside a room dedicated to toddlers was a little girl no older than 2, screaming and pounding her fists on a mat. One woman tried to give her toys and books to calm her down, but even that shelter worker seemed frustrated, Kraft told The Washington Post, because as much as she wanted to console the little girl, she couldn’t touch, hold or pick her up to let her know everything would be all right. That was the rule, Kraft said she was told: They’re not allowed to touch the children.

“The really devastating thing was that we all knew what was going on with this child. We all knew what the problem was,” Kraft said. “She didn’t have her mother, and none of us can fix that.”

According to NBC news, there are as many as 11,000 children imprisoned: infants, babies, toddlers, young children, adolescents.  Some have been kept in cages.  But nobody knows the actual number.  The media has seen only one facility--a converted Walmart--with more than 1500 boys, but nobody has seen others, particularly with infants, babies and toddlers. [see update above]  Even at that one facility, reporters weren't permitted to speak with inmates or in most cases to take photos.

We do know that the existing prisons are overcrowded, and the administration is set to build tent cities, the first one in Texas to hold hundreds of children in this improvised concentration camp or gulag, which will not be subject to the regulations governing health and safety in for example the Walmart prison.

White House spokesperson S.H. Sanders was heavily questioned on Thursday about this human rights abuse.  One outburst by a media rep has been widely featured, but not this one, noted by Politico:

“It's a policy to take children away from their parents," Acosta said. "Can you imagine the horror these children must be going to, when they come across the border, they're with their parents and suddenly they're pulled away from their parents? Why is government doing this?”

“Because it's the law,” Sanders said.

That is first of all a lie, as every legitimate news organization affirms.  It is not the law, but a policy to separate children from their parents unique to this US government.  The antipresident himself blames the policy on congressional Democrats because they won't join the administration's cruel and unnecessary immigration legislation.  As if Republicans didn't hold majorities in both houses anyway.  But even to pretend to hold the future of these children as items of blackmail in a political fight is beyond cynicism and well into Hitlerland.

It is a policy established by AG Jeff Sessions, who also wants everyone to believe it is the law, as he justified it by quoting a Biblical passage from St. Paul, which out of context says that laws must be obeyed because they are the instruments of God.

As Ed Kilgore comments:
Those who are unacquainted with the Bible should be aware that the brief seven-verse portion of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has been throughout the ages cited to oppose resistance to just about every unjust law or regime you can imagine. As the New York Times’ Yoni Applebaum quickly pointed out, it was especially popular among those opposing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act in the run-up to the Civil War. It was reportedly Adolf Hitler’s favorite biblical passage. And it was used by defenders of South African Apartheid and of our own Jim Crow."

Sessions himself is pretty selective about which laws he thinks are God's will: the Affordable Care Act's guarantee that care will be covered for pre-existing conditions being one of them that must be the devil's work.

Senator Feinstein of California has introduced legislation that simply and directly reverses this policy and prevents families from being broken at the border.  If Republicans are so flummoxed by the law let them vote to change it.

But no one expects that to happen.  So Americans take to the streets--first locally, as in California on Monday, on a related aspect: the treatment of asylum seekers:

"In what is likely the first in a series of immigration-related protests, several hundred people came to a rally outside the Otay Mesa Detention Center on Sunday demanding the release of asylum seekers fleeing gang violence and state repression.

They were taking up the cause of asylum seekers who –for the most part–have voluntarily turned themselves at the border. Little did the protesters know their own participation in the event would lead to harassment by border authorities.

Protests are spreading nationwide in the wake of horrific reports of abuse and mistreatment by immigration agencies. People are speaking out against a President who refers to immigrants as ‘animals’ and implements policies inflicting punishment on people whose rights to due process are rapidly vanishing."

Conditions in one facility for these captives involved virtual slave labor.

The first national protests on the separation of children from parents and the imprisonment of children were held on Thursday, as thousands of Americans marched in an estimated 30 US cities and towns.  That will have to be just the beginning of protest.

The New York Times coverage on the Los Angeles demo began:

"Drawing on an American history of cruelty, from the conquest of the Indians to the slave trade to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, activists in this city gathered on Thursday to voice outrage at what they see as the latest affront to American values by the Trump administration: splitting up migrant families at border crossings, and confining children in detention facilities.

“I think we are fighting for the heart and soul of America,” Yolanda Varela Gonzalez, a teacher and activist, told a crowd of several hundred protesters in MacArthur Park, before they marched to an immigrant detention center in downtown Los Angeles."

We Were Strangers Once, Too

It didn't take long for Republican noisemakers to pummel the media with their hypocritical cant and carping, so here is a rare opportunity to hear what President Obama actually said in his 15 minute talk to the American people Thursday on immigration.

He spelled out actions he'd taken to strengthen the southern borders and results that should cheer GOPers if they could accept the facts, and he talked about the efforts to pass immigration reform that have been stymied by Republican leadership in the House.  Like Ronald Reagan and lots of Presidents before him, he outlined a few steps he could take under well-established presidential authority.

But why bother?  That's when this talk rises above policy to get at the American soul, and the soul of our President.  So don't let your ears glaze over before you get there.

"Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger -- we were strangers once, too.  My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too. And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal – that all of us are created equal..."