The Trump administration has made the clear strategic decision that showing pictures of little girls wailing post-separation or perhaps those of young girls trying to soothe smaller ones they don't even know in detention doesn't play into their all-immigrants-are-future-gang members election narrative. Thus, we have seen zero pictures of little girls in detention and also zero pictures of toddlers. All the government-released photos—and they are plenty disturbing—have been of little boys peering through the chain-linked cages they are jailed in. And not for lack of trying by reporters.
During Monday’s ultra delayed White House briefing, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, now the poster girl for defending state-sponsored terror, denied having any awareness that her own agency had selectively shared only photos of boys.
“I am not familiar with those particular images,” Nielsen told reporters trying to suggest maybe Health and Human Services had released the photos, not DHS. When reporters confirmed the photos had indeed been released “by your department,” Nielsen said: “I will look into that.”
What that apparently means is that DHS is now on a mad dash to generate acceptable photos of girls and toddlers being held in detention and cared for by workers who, however well meaning, are prohibited from soothing them, picking them up, or any form of physical contact.
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Seriously, what are they going to do? Ship in some Betty Crocker play ovens, a dump truck full of dolls and hold a giant tea party?
This is just sick. It’s sickening and it’s a clear, pre-meditated policy by the administration to shield the public from certain aspects of their barbaric policy, while they try to play up their preferred narrative. And their preferred narrative is that every little boy or male teenager separated from their parents is one less future MS-13 gang member. Trump talks about MS-13 in every speech he gives and Sec. Nielsen invoked the gang during yesterday’s briefing. In fact, she tried to justify the utility of punishing small children in order to prevent smugglers and gang members from entering the country.
“The kids are being used by pawns by the smugglers and the traffickers. Again, let’s just pause to think about this statistic: 314 percent increase in adults showing up with kids that are not a family unit. Those are traffickers, those are smugglers. That is MS-13. Those are criminals and those are abusers.”
That 314 percent sounds big until you realize that the number of alleged “smugglers” accounted for LESS THAN ONE PERCENT of the families approaching the border during the time frame she is mentioning. Washington Post’s Phillip Bump writes:
Even given the increased number of alleged smugglers this fiscal year and the decreased number of family units, those smugglers, those traffickers, those MS-13 members make up only 0.61 percent of the total number of family units apprehended at the border. In other words, for every 1,000 families that approached the border in the first five months of this fiscal year, only six allegedly involved individuals pretending to be a child’s parents.
So if you’re wondering what could possibly justify visiting this unspeakable horror on thousands of defenseless children and parents alike, there’s Sec. Nielsen’s answer—DHS found that six families in every 1,000 approaching the border were headed by posers. Thus, children must be cruelly ripped from the arms of their parents and jailed separately with no governmental plan whatsoever to reunite them in many cases.
In the meantime, get ready for some sanitized pictures of little girls and tiny tiny children thriving in detention. Supposedly the government will be providing them in the next couple days. Sec. Nielsen is looking into it.