In this installment of House Republicans Saying Monstrous Things, North Carolina Rep. Robert Pittenger says that we need to deport refugee children even if deporting them
will get them killed.
When a constituent stood up and accused the freshman congressman of not doing enough to secure the border, Pittenger protested that he helped the House of Representatives pass a “very good bill” that would deport both the newly arrived child migrants as well as those commonly known as DREAMers who have been raised in the US. [...]
When ThinkProgress asked Pittenger if these deportations should continue in the light of reports that some of the children have been killed upon return, he said they should.
“It’s the most egregious, awful crime and a pity, what has happened to these young children,” he told ThinkProgress. “But do you want to open up America’s doors to the entire world? We can’t handle the healthcare and education today for our own population! We have to be sensible about what we our system can manage. So you put them on planes and you send them back.”
We regularly ask other countries to take in refugee floods from our various attempts to export our special brand of laser-guided Freedom into various countries that need some, and the refugee crises that other countries have had to deal with, whether things we helped cause (like wars or sectarian violence) or ones we didn't (droughts, famine) have generally been far larger than any recent uptick we have seen at our own border. The international community that Bob here so looks down upon considers the forced relocation of refugees back into the violence they fled from to be a monstrous and unacceptable thing—to say that we cannot handle a few thousand or a few tens of thousands because we can't be bothered with their education and we don't want to give them medical care is evidence of little more than an exceptional cowardice.
So it's a "pity" that we've been deporting children back into situations where they have already ended up dead, but not a "pity" enough to stop doing it. Good to know. It all sounds very conservative and very Christian, and North Carolina constituents should be proud that they are willing to stand up to Big Childhood and feed just a few more kids into the grinders. It's that or educating them, after all, and we just couldn't stomach that.