We begin today’s roundup with this piece, written anonymously in The New York Times “because of the gang-related threats she and her family face in the United States and in El Salvador.” As Trump tries to shift his cruel policy from ripping children from their parents’ arms to extended family detention, the author reminds us that we must be vigilant in the fight to protect human rights and uphold our values:
[W]e were held for two months in a family immigration detention center in Artesia, N.M., run by a for-profit company.
The day-to-day conditions were horrible. The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick.
It was no place for human beings, let alone for families with small children.
When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.
The Trump administration expects to detain so many families for the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry, they’re not just looking at private companies (which, by the way, have donated millions to GOP campaigns and committees). They’re building tent cities at military locations. James LaPorta and Spencer Ackerman at The Daily Beast give us the reaction of some in the military of Trump using the Department of Defense to implement his cruel agenda:
Active-duty and retired U.S. military officers and enlisted personnel are expressing a sense of moral emergency over the Defense Department setting up detention camps for undocumented immigrants on military bases.
“It smacks of totalitarianism,” said Steve Kleinman, a retired Air Force colonel and military intelligence officer.
Raf Noboa, an Iraq War veteran and former Army sergeant, said he was astounded by the “enormous moral offense” the camps represent and which the military will be ordered to support.
“America’s military once liberated people from concentration camps,” Noboa told The Daily Beast. “It beggars the mind and our morality that it might be used to secure them.”
Don’t miss Michelle Goldberg’s excellent piece on the crisis of democracy:
All over the country, Republican members of Congress have consistently refused to so much as meet with many of the scared, furious citizens they ostensibly represent. A great many of these citizens are working tirelessly to take at least one house of Congress in the midterms — which will require substantially more than 50 percent of total votes, given structural Republican advantages — so that the country’s anti-Trump majority will have some voice in the federal government.
But unless and until that happens, millions and millions of Americans watch helplessly as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies. The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis.
Jason Sattler at USA Today:
The fear of giving Trump exactly what he wants and thus empowering him into even greater horrors is often used as a cudgel. Critics use it to bash almost anyone who makes the brave decision to risk rebuke from the most powerful man in the world — a man who wields that power the way a 2-year-old wields a rattle — and his rabid fans. [...] The guardians of civility prophesy that sense can overwhelm a regime holding thousands of children hostages from their parents until the parents agree to return as a family to the country they fled in fear for their lives. They are sure that politeness is the only way to oppose an administration that is inventing new law in an attempt to give tens of millions of Americans their pre-existing conditions back, likely making cancer patients uninsurable. Civility, they insist, is required to counter an administration that won’t even make a serious attempt to count how many Americans died due to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where thousands are still without power as hurricane season has begun again.
Once you realize that nothing you can say will stop Trump from running a propaganda campaign against immigrants that invites comparisons to Hitler’s early attacks on Jews, you have to ask yourself what you want to do about it. [...] You can pretend that all of these things aren’t happening in your name.
Or you can do what the owner of the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, did. She surveyed her staff, several of whom are gay, and decided to politely ask Sanders to leave.
Goldie Taylor at The Daily Beast:
This administration has been engaged in the mass incarceration of children, some as young as three months old. Now, it now has plans to house tens of thousands of detainees on our nation’s military bases. Trump also says he wants to get rid of due process for those who come to our borders seeking asylum, ending one of the foundational civil liberties that separates this country from authoritarian nations. Who thinks he would stop with asylum seekers?
There should be a public price to pay for that. There should be a price to pay for propping up and supporting this president’s virulently racist policies and plans.
David Faris pens a must-read on the Republican outrage machine:
The point is this: The right's outrage politics need no sustenance. It's like a virus, and you are the host. If the Red Hen restaurant didn't exist, Fox News would find something else, for without a constant supply of minor slights and puffed-up grievances to convey to their aging white viewers, what exactly would happen on this network 24 hours a day? The mission of Fox News and its ilk is to scour this enormous country every day for something that will keep its viewers in a constant state of spittle-flecked fury.
Wherever you fall on Red Hengate, this all really should prompt some hard questions. If you think that Sarah Huckabee Sanders should not be shunned in public based on what she and her colleagues have done in office thus far, where would you draw the line? There has to be a line, right? Surely even the most committed Normalists would admit that there is something that the Trump administration could do to warrant the kind of peaceful but unpleasant snubbing and harassment that is being delivered to its apparatchiks right now by a handful of private citizens and activists.
Are we not there yet?
On a final note, here’s a great piece by Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:
And what about civility? Well, fundamental to, and governing the practice of, civility is the principle of reciprocity: your place at my table implies my place at yours. Conservatives and liberals, right-wingers and left-wingers, Jews and Muslims and Christians and Socialists and round- and flat-Earthers—all should have a place at any table and be welcome to sit where they like. On the other hand, someone who has decided to make it her public role to extend, with a blizzard of falsehoods, the words of a pathological liar, and to support, with pretended piety, the acts of a public person of unparalleled personal cruelty—well, that person has asked us in advance to exclude her from our common meal. You cannot spit in the plates and then demand your dinner. The best way to receive civility at night is to not assault it all day long. It’s the simple wisdom of the table.