Will Bunch:
On Jacinto’s wrist was the yellow bracelet that, the newspaper reported, federal authorities have begun using to mark mothers and fathers who’ve been forcibly separated from their kids under the heartless program that the so-called Justice Department has named Operation Streamline — bland Orwellian doublespeak to mask a human-rights outrage. It was just a decade ago that a yellow bracelet meant support for humanitarian causes like fighting cancer. Now, it’s a symbol of a cancer on the American spirit, led by a president and his top aides who dehumanize migrants and now terrorize their families, fueled by cynical demagogic politics and a dollop of old-time prejudice. [...]
[L]ast month top officials in the department made a stunning admission to a federal hearing: When officials tried to follow up from October through December of 2017 on the whereabouts of roughly 7.500 kids the federal government had placed with sponsors, it was unable to find out what happened to 1,475 of them, or roughly one in five. These children didn’t just disappear. The supposed adults of the U.S. government lost them.
On CNN, paid commenter Rick Santorum dismissed the reports, calling it "hyperbole to try to create an issue where I don't really think there is one."
Now, the reality is a lot of these sponsors are in many cases have -- they've been checked out but they may have other reasons for not communicating or dropping off the system. So this isn't what we've lost these kids. No, they were placed in vetted homes and for some reason or another these parents are not communicating [...]
Of import in the debate over whether 1,475 missing children is issue or mere hyperbole is the agency's past record of child placements. In 2016, the Senate found that some of the unaccompanied children handed off to sponsor homes by ICE had in fact been turned over to human traffickers.
found that “over a period of four months in 2014, however, HHS placed a number of UACs [Unaccompanied Alien Children] in the hands of a ring of human traffickers who forced them to work on egg farms in and around Marion, Ohio, leading to a July 2015 federal criminal indictment. According to the indictment, the minor victims were forced to work at egg farms in Marion and other location for six or seven days a week, twelve hours per day.”
The Trump administration has now ordered that all children be separated from their parents upon apprehension by ICE, a move intended as deterrent to families that cross the border without proper papers.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES • THE WEEK’S HIGH IMPACT STORIES
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—Obama! Colbert! Phoenix! We’re Calling You Out!
Without a hefty cash advance, nobody with more than a dozen working synapses would want the job of figuring out over a one-year span whether The Weekly Standard or The Corner, National Review Online's group blog, posts the more aromatic tripe. But, Wednesday at least, it's no contest. In his "It Sticks in My Craw," Mark Krikorian explains that "Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English. ..."
Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.
Without getting into the whole multiculturalism contretemps in this matter—Andrew Leonard does a good job of that at Salon - most people, out of courtesy and an expectation of reciprocation, defer to the individual's preference when pronouncing a name. Krikorian allows as how that's okay, "but there ought to be limits." Which he proceeds to establish.
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for "Netroots Radio.” |