We thought America had grown into a country that was no longer capable of inhumane atrocities. We thought that events such as the Trail of Tears where U.S. States and Presidents implemented a forced migration of nearly 120,000 native Americans whose lands were then given to white farmers which subjected thousands to diseases such as whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera and, starvation which killed between 5,000-8,500 along the journey. We never thought we’d ever see anything like the Tuskegee Experiment where 600 African-American men were given placebos instead of penicillin for their diagnosis of syphilis in order to track the progress of the disease from blindness to insanity and ultimately their death. We never thought we’d ever commit another atrocity like the forced internment of Japanese Americans during WWII which took 117,000 people, most of whom were American citizens, out of their homes, confiscated their property and held them in captivity for years.
Now, today, in 21st Century America our government is constructing tent cities on U.S. Military property in order to house the children of immigrants who have been forcibly separated from their parents as they crossed the border, regardless of whether they did so legally or not.
If that seems hyperbolic, I frankly believe it’s probably an understatement of how devastating and deadly this situation could possibly become.
We should know better by now but apparently, if you listen to WH advisor Steven Miller, we don’t.
Controversial White House advisor Stephen Miller bragged about President Donald Trump’s new policy of child separation as a “simple decision” during a West Wing interview with The New York Times.
“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” Miller told The Times.
“It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” he claimed. “The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”
In May, New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay identified Miller as the leader of a White House faction intentionally inflicting harm.
“Let’s be clear, though, immigration has been an issue, a difficult one, a thorny one for the administration, but some of the stuff we’re seeing, the cruelty, is intentional,” Gay argued. “You know, this is a ‘Stephen Miller faction.’ That’s what’s happening.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) reached a similar conclusion.
“This is not a zero tolerance policy, this is a zero humanity policy, and we can’t let it go on,” Merkley suggested. “Ripping children out of their parents’ arms to inflict harm on the child to influence the parents is unacceptable.”
Despite Miller’s admission that this was a decision made specifically by the Trump Administration, Trump himself continues to claim this is the product of a “Democrat Law” which is a lie and potentially makes this if anything worst than either the Trail of Tears, the Tuskegee Experiment or the Internment of Japanese because this policy is apparently being done almost entirely for political purposes. There is no legitimate national security rationale for this. There is no need to implement this policy other than for Trump to use as a political cudgel against Democrats in his drive to fund a border wall.
As it turns out Sen. Diane Feinstein has a bill to end the separation of these children from their parents which has 43 sponsors, but as yet, not a single Republicans has signed on in support of it.
The Keep Families Together Act was developed in consultation with child welfare experts to ensure the federal government is acting in the best interest of children. The bill is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), Children’s Law Center, Young Center for Immigrant Rights and the Women's Refugee Commission.
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“The United States must not be a country that traumatizes young children by separating them from their parents. Young children have been taken from their parents’ arms and federal law enforcement hasn’t given parents even the most basic information about their children’s whereabouts,” Feinstein said. “Congress has a moral obligation to take a stand and say that families should not be forcibly separated. Many of these families are fleeing terrible violence, traveling thousands of miles on foot for the chance to file an asylum claim and save their lives. To traumatize them further is unconscionable, and I hope that our Republican colleagues will work with us to put an end to this immoral policy.”
“Let me be clear: there is no law requiring this Administration to separate children from their parents—Attorney General Sessions and Secretary Nielsen are choosing to tear families apart to intimidate those who are lawfully seeking asylum in our country. It’s extreme, heartbreaking, un-American, and has to stop,” said Durbin.
There is no law that requires this, the argument that there is would be like saying that because there are laws on the books against jay-walking, illegal lane changes and ignoring stop signs, all of which are misdemeanors just like the “crime” of illegal entry, that each and every time someone is pulled over or stopped for any of these offenses they should be immediately apprehended, sent to jail and separated from their children who are then placed in a different facility for an undeterminate time period which could be for months, if not years.
That’s what “zero tolerance” really means, and it’s patently absurd.
This shouldn’t even be an argument.
This should be something we could agree on, but it’s not. Those in support of this policy claim that we need to have “zero tolerance” because otherwise, we are incentivizing people to bring their children on a dangerous 2,000+ mile journey from Central America to our borders. They all seem to think that “toughness”, is what you need to show in order to change behaviors.
Let me just ask, when has that ever proven to be true?
For example, can we see a correlation between states that continue to implement the death penalty that shows that it is an effective deterrent against murder?
Well, the facts are that murder rates are higher in death penalty states by an amount that has peaked several times above 44% over the past 30 years, even while the overall murder rate has dramatically declined.
Surveys of criminologists tend to concur:
Nearly 78% of those surveyed said that having the death penalty in a state does not lower the murder rate. In addition, 91% of respondents said politicians support the death penalty in order to appear tough on crime – and 75% said that it distracts legislatures on the state and national level from focusing on real solutions to crime problems. Over all, 94% agreed that there was little emperical evidence to support the deterrent effect of the death penalty. And 90% said the death penalty had little effect overall on the committing of murder. Additionally, 91.6% said that increasing the frequency of executions would not add a deterrent effect, and 87.6% said that speeding up executions wouldn't work either.
So if executing people doesn’t slow the murder rate, how do we know that child separation is going to slow the rate of people fleeing governmental, domestic and gang violence in Central America? If they assume that people are performing mental calculus on whether their children are better off being conscripted into MS-13 in El Salvador or making the 2,500 hundred mile trek to the U.S., even having their children taken away won’t deter them, because their being alive is better than their being murdered by some rival gang. Women, young girls, and LBTG youth are still going to make the trip, rather than be terrorized, repeatedly beaten, raped or murdered.
The number of asylum seekers originating from the Northern Triangle reached 110,000 in 2015, a five-fold increase from 2012. Unaccompanied minors accounted for much of this surge [PDF]. Migrants from all three countries cite violence, forced gang recruitment, and extortion, as well as poverty and lack of opportunity, as their reasons for leaving. While Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama have reported a sharp increase in flows from the Northern Triangle since 2008, most migrants are passing through to settle in the United States. In 2015, the latest year for which data is available, as many as 3.4 million people born in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were living in the United States, more than double the estimated 1.5 million people in 2000. About 55 percent of them were undocumented.
El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras consistently rank among the most violent countries in the world. El Salvador became the world’s most violent country not at war in 2015, when gang-related violence brought its homicide rate to 103 per hundred thousand. It has since fallen by one third. Nevertheless, all three countries have significantly higher homicide rates than neighboring Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama.
Extortion is also rampant. A 2015 investigation by Honduran newspaper La Prensa found that Salvadorans and Hondurans pay an estimated $390 million, $200 million, and $61 million, respectively, in annual extortion fees to organized crime groups. Extortionists primarily target public transportation operators, small businesses, and residents of poor neighborhoods, according to the report, and attacks on people who do not pay contribute to the violence.
Frankly, it’s not even a difficult choice.
Contrasted to 103 murders per 100k people in El Salvador, the most dangerous American city is St. Louis which has 59.29 murders per 100k people, followed by Baltimore at a rate of 55.37, Detroit in 3rd place with a rate of 43.82 and New Orleans in 4th at 41.68. [For the record Chicago in 25th place with a rate of 17.52.]
The worst parts of this are the facts that in addition to all this, Jeff Sessions has changed the rules on what constitutes “legal” entry for asylum by specifically excluding those seeking refuge from racial, gender, domestic and gang violence.
On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it harder for asylum-seekers to enter the United States. He announced that being a victim of domestic abuse or gang violence will no longer be accepted as a basis for claiming asylum. “An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons related to her social, economic, family or other personal circumstances,” he wrote. “Yet the statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.” Sessions’ decision was the result of his intervention in an asylum case known as "Matter of A-B-".
Sessions’ decision sets a new bar for heartlessness by arguably the most anti-immigrant administration in modern history. It is not supported by the reality of our immigration system; Sessions is overturning settled law and creating legal precedent based on his political views. His ruling will likely expose thousands of women, children, and LGBTQ asylum-seekers to danger or death in their homelands.
So with this combination of changes, zero tolerance and the disallowance of what is settled U.S. and international law says are legitimate legal cases for refugee asylum means that people who have followed the existing law, who have done things the correct and proper way — and still suffering the consequences of these policies.
The courts are likely to overturn Session’s new refugee rules, but that will take time.
In the meanwhile as result of these policies, we now have massive overcrowding of the existing facilities which were put in place to address unaccompanied minors who have in recent years been pouring northward to escape Central American violence. Now they’re going to “tent cities” and that should be chilling considered the track record of previous tent cities such as those implemented by former Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona, which even Arpaio himself said was a “Concentration Camp.”
In 1993 Joe Arpaio, America’s ‘toughest sheriff’, opened a temporary outdoor jail in Phoenix. After more than two decades, the notorious project is finally closing.
‘Hitler! Hitler!” the prisoners chanted to the TV cameras in protest. It was 4 February 2009. More than 200 Latino men in black-and-white striped uniforms, shackled to each other, were being marched towards an outdoor unit especially for “illegal alien” prisoners in Arizona’s infamous jail, Tent City.
The chants were directed at the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who a few months before had called this outdoor jail close to downtown Phoenix – his own tough-on-crime creation – a “concentration camp” in a speech to political supporters at his local Italian-American club.
When asked about the comment by the Guardian in July, Arpaio brushed it off as a joke. “But even if it was a concentration camp, what difference does it make? I still survived. I still kept getting re-elected,” he said.
This is on top of the reality that the rate of in custody deaths under Arpaio, both within the Tent City and his normal jails, was quite literally off the charts.
Lacey’s recent story, “Prisoners Hang Themselves in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Jails at a Rate That Dwarfs Other County Lockups,” is explosive, and not just because he uncovered an alarming suicide rate in Maricopa County jails. Lacey also probes, without much help from county administrators, the number of jail deaths in general. He stumbles into a sick universe of crime and denial, but nothing we should be surprised about given what we know about Sheriff Arpaio.
The number of suicides is off the charts, which is sadly understandable when you consider the proven mistreatment of inmates and the conditions in places like Tent City. The food is atrocious, Tent City can reach 145 degrees in the summer, and one federal judge ruled twice that the medical care and other conditions are unconstitutional. So, while most big county lockups have suicide rates ranging from 6 to 14 percent, the percentage of deaths in Arpaio’s jails from suicide is 24 percent.
The death rate for those who were forced along the trail of tears was, at worst, about 14% - which is not to ignore all the other hardships involved. I’m just putting things in perspective. We know from former workers at one of the existing HHS facilities that employee training which is minimal.
We know that as opposed to the unaccompanied minors who tend to spend an average of 41 days in these facilities the newly separating children are traumatized and unruly and the length of their potential stays are indeterminate while their parents work their way through the justice system and may ultimately be deported without them.
There is no way that these Tent Cities, which are being erected in the middle of the Texas summer, are going to be better handled and safer environments for these children than the HHS centers.
On top of being emotionally scarred, these kids are going to quickly be a severe risk for health conditions. Some of them, I would suspect far more than 14% among the 12,000 that are currently in custody are likely to be seriously harmed or die— which is about 1,640 just slightly higher than the 1,500 of kids they’ve already “lost” — under these overcrowded and harsh conditions.
Again, I don’t think that’s hyperbolic. I think it’s quite deliberate. The Trumpsters are trying to create “maximum pain” and discomfort and then dump the blame for all of this magically into the laps of Democrats either to force them to commit to funding Trump’s wall and/or to hammer over their heads leading into the 2018 mid-terms.
It’s a cold, calculated political act using the lives and health of children as bargaining chips in a larger game of “chicken.” In short, it's psychological terrorism.
The fact that we haven’t already seen massive, deafening demonstrations in protest of this callous cruelty against children is a national disgrace.
We thought we were better than this but obviously, we are not. We thought America was better than this but obviously, it is not.
Not until we stand up and make it better. Not until we stand up and refuse to let America fall yet again down this dark rabbit hole. We have to speak up, we have to defend the defenseless, and push back hard on the lies and deception of the Trumpsters.
This was their choice, we have to rise up and take that choice away from them because they clearly can't be trusted.
Sunday, Jun 17, 2018 · 7:11:35 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Yet another bogus argument coming from the Trumpsters is that people who are trying to surrender themselves at the border as refugees could be going the same thing by going to the U.S. embassy or consulate in their own county. Well, Trump has fracked that up too.
The Trump administration has wasted no time taking further aim against asylum seekers, individuals fleeing persecution in their home countries and seeking protection in the United States. Earlier this week, President Trump referred to asylum seekers as taking advantage of “loopholes” and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has also made his animus for asylum seekers quite clear.
Asylum seekers can either apply for asylum affirmatively with the asylum office, or raise their fear of return to their home country as a defense to removal proceedings. The backlog at the asylum offices, for affirmative asylum seekers, includes around 311,000 individuals. Many of these asylum seekers have now been waiting one, two, three, four, and even five years for an interview with an asylum officer.
Until recently, asylum interviews were scheduled chronologically according to when the asylum applicant submitted their application; the wait was far too long, but there was an end in sight. On January 29, however, the Asylum Office issued a new memo explaining that they will now prioritize adjudication of the most recently-filed applications, those pending 21 days or less. While this may be a relief for asylum seekers who have just filed their applications or are about to file, for the more than 300,000 asylum seekers who have already filed and patiently waited in line, the government has effectively constructed a wall blocking adjudication of their applications and leaving them in legal limbo indefinitely.
Oh, look another “Wall!”
So those people who supposedly have been trying to this the “legal” way without trecking across the Mexican desert, have been frozen out for years now. This is no real answer when your life is on the line.
From the first moment that he announced he was running Trump has demonized and dehumanizing migrants “Mexicans are rapists, they bring drugs and crime” in a way designed to short-circuit human empathy. He proposed blocking all Muslims, even those who were specifically fleeing the violence of ISIS from being able to enter the U.S. under the idea that there was no difference between the ISIS terrorist and the families and children who were fleeing them.
Picture of dead children, drowned in the surf wasn’t enough to generate a smidgen of empathy in these people.
Calling it “Racist” is soft-balling it. It's Terrorism.
Just think about what his immigration policies have been so far:
This is part of Trump’s Citizen Supremacy which is at the core of his “America[ns] First” ideology. He like Steve Bannon believes that Americans, particularly American Citizens, are literally better than everyone else. He believes that the protections of free speech, due process, probable cause, protection from cruel and unusual punishment only exist for citizens. Not everyone, just the citizens and only then if they happen to be appropriately acquiescent, genuflecting, and adoring citizens.
Non-citizens, even those who are here perfectly legally and people who have the “wrong” religion, or those who don’t act sufficiently “American” — ie. Right-wing — enough aren’t worthy of the protections of the Constitution regardless of the fact of what the 14th Amendment says about “all persons within the jurisdiction of the state having the equal protection of the laws.”
Thus U.S. Congresspeople who don’t enthusiastically clap the dear leader are “Treasonous”, NFL players who don’t stand at attention during the National Anthem — where the third verse rails against the fleeing the slaves — not only should be “fired” they shouldn’t “be in the country.”
It’s not exactly Nazism, it’s not exactly Fascism, it’s something different — but in the end, even if we don’t have a nifty new name for it besides “alt-Rightism”, this is a new breed of virulent .hyper-patriotic-ish jingoism and Christo-White nationalistic authoritarianism - perhaps we could call it “#Trumptarianism” — that is just as bad as any other form of state cultism we’ve seen before.