During the 24 years that former sheriff Joe Arpaio kept his infamous Maricopa County, Arizona “tent city” in full operation, it showed no mercy to the human beings locked up inside. “One man died in his bed,” Francisco Chairez, who was jailed there for a year, later recalled. Shoes melted in scorching, 120 degree heat. “People would faint; some had heatstroke,” Chairez continued. “That summer, ambulances came about three times.”
Arpaio himself said, in what he later tried to walk back as a joke, that he was running a “concentration camp.” But he was, and he meant it, and now Donald Trump, after pardoning him for criminal contempt of court, is reportedly following his lead. “The Trump administration is looking to build tent cities at military posts,” McClatchy reported Tuesday, “around Texas to shelter the increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children being held in detention.”
Trump’s barbaric policy of tearing kids from the arms of migrant parents at the U.S./Mexico border has resulted in so many arrests, that parents, many of them asylum-seekers, are getting shipped to federal prisons while child detention centers are nearing capacity. The federal government could easily release these kids to sponsors, but that would mean freedom. Joe Arpaio is apparently deserving of it, but not kids fleeing to America for safety.
That’s led the administration to explore other options for children they’ve kidnapped, including the possibility of keeping them on military bases. Now, apparently, that’s transitioned into “tent cities” in Abilene and San Angelo, Texas, where as many as 5,000 kids may be kept. How are these any different than internment camps, or the concentration camps Arpaio boasted about? They’re not.
Tweets proclaiming that “this is not who we are” are not going to save these kids. We have already become what we are fearing, and the time for action has already been here. Call on your members of Congress to follow the lead of Pramila Jayapal and Jeff Merkley and get their asses to facilities holding families, to support pro-immigrant legislation, and to expose what is happening on our dime. You can also show your support at a Families Belong rally on June 14.
The temperature in Abilene will reach a high of 96 today. In San Angelo, 97.
