After the story of children being torn away from their parents at the border first came up, I didn’t think I could be more surprised or horrified by any aspect of it. I didn’t realize that I was having assumptions that normal, decent, civilized people have, or at least one: that ICE or someone would keep track of which kids were separated from which parents. I just assumed that, didn’t even think otherwise.
Cynical as I am—and I have become more so since Jan. 20, 2017—I was fooled.
Hell, as I was having dinner, I even thought, is this really happening? Maybe I’d better check the sources just to be absolutely sure.
Erik Hanshew, a federal public defender in El Paso, told me that the problems begin at the moment of arrest. “Our client gets arrested with his or her child out in the field. Sometimes they go together at the initial processing, sometimes they get separated right then and there for separate processing,” he said. “When we ask the Border Patrol agents at detention hearings a few days after physical arrest about the information they’ve obtained in their investigation, they tell us that the only thing they know is that the person arrested was with a kid. They don’t seem to know gender, age, or name.”
[Laura Clawson citing a New Yorker story.]
You know, even the Nazis kept records of who they killed at Auschwitz. All their names and numbers. You can even search someone, killed or survived, as long as they’re not among the records that were lost or destroyed.
This lack of recording in America is not just carelessness. Here’s what it means.
These children are being designated by the criminal administration as disposable. It is beyond dehumanization; it is expulsion from humanity. They are being thrown away. By taking them away from their parents permanently, the illegitimate administration is declaring it does not matter whether they live or die, let alone whether they’re traumatized. The intention is that they are dead to their parents, never to be seen again. With no protection, they have been designated meat and commodities, to be used by whoever ends up owning them. (And yes, they are already owned, as they live in prisons and have been taken away from their parents.)
Cleaved from those who love them and care whether they live and are happy, they have been sentenced to live under the control of those who do not. And their owners do not want you to know who controls them, or where, or in what kind of conditions. Hence these sanitized boys-only tours.
Parents have been deported while their kids have been kept in the USA. What are the plans for those kids? These plans are not being made by anyone who loves them or even recognizes their humanity.
The apparent intention is that they will disappear into the system. They’ll be flown or driven somewhere, and neither their parents nor anyone else will ever know their fate. No one will ever know whether they’ve died of broken hearts and been thrown into unmarked graves, whether they’ve been sold as sex slaves, whether they are being forced to work somewhere in the world as labour slaves. If they are babies they will not remember their true identities, making it easy to force new ones on them. If they are older they may be forbidden their true identities; certainly that is already happening insofar as parentage and ancestry are part of identity.
Got it?
They are the Jewish children taken away from their parents, thrown into the gas chambers or tattooed with numbers and used as slave labour. They are the indigenous children stolen from their parents and raised white so as to destroy their culture. They are the African children taken away from their parents in chains and loaded onto ships to be given new names and enslaved in a land far away.
Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller have no problem with those parts of history, with the dehumanization, exploitation, torture and massacre of human beings who are different in skin colour or culture. It’s in their personalities, as it continues to exist as an evil residual subculture in America. I think it’s absolutely possible that these three and others in the mal-administration and agencies are happy to repeat them. Yes, even the death camps. Yesterday, before I learned that records are not being kept of which children came of which parents, I didn’t really think that was possible, even though Trump called Nazis “very fine people” after Charlottesville.
Now I do.
On the soil of the United States of America, children from infancy to 17 are being stripped of all rights and freedoms along with their identities and designated as resources to be used and/or discarded, without regard for their humanness.
Look at the lies. Parents are given a card with a number they may call for “assistance” retrieving their children. They’re told that giving information is voluntary, but may be used against them—but if they don’t provide it, they’ll get no assistance in finding their children. Parents are being blackmailed into incriminating themselves to get their kids back. But it’s all lies—the promise is being implied with no intention of it ever being honoured, because the officials don’t even know where the children are. Prisoners coming off the trains were promised they’d be well-treated when they arrived at Auschwitz, too.
Look at the lies. “We are just giving your child a bath. It’s a long bath.” “You can all have showers now.”
Child shelters are being changed into private prisons and concentration camps are being built. Don’t be fooled by weasel-words like “enclosures” or “tent cities”. The Nazis referred to Jews and others marked for massacre as “cargo to be processed;” think of that when someone talks about “processing” these kids.
This kind of lying is only told by those who are intent on destroying other people and covering it up.
—
As I said elsewhere in another diary—it is a test. Act now and act hard or fail, and see this vicious cabal of savages up the level of evil even more.
“First they came for the Latinx asylum-seekers, and I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t a Latinx asylum-seeker.” None of us ever want to have to admit that in the future.
Always remember what drives you, and act in that spirit. MLK & Gandhi. LOVE.
I think Ted Cruz’s legislation is the biggest blink yet, a big crack in their armour. They possibly feel they’re on the ropes—so the thing to do, as someone said in a comment in another diary, is to pound harder until it’s an absolute knock-out. Do I need to list off all the ways to say something yet again? Lots of diaries now are listing them.
Godwin’s law is out the window now. Make the Nazi comparison freely because everyone is, at this point. (I never did. Until today.)
Since we now have representative audio, here’s another possible action item. Get big speakers and run the audio from the video through them wherever Republicans can be found. The White House… Capitol Hill… constituency offices… Trump rallies. Play it good and loud. Send it to your Trump-supporting family members, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, especially if they are parents. Tell them to think of their kids and then click on the link. Or do it like a rickroll, “You might be interested in this.” Then tell them you are sure that this is not what they really wanted when they voted as they did because you can’t believe that of them.
Even if you can’t bear to listen to it yourself, share the fuck out of it on social media. In Germany in the 1930s and 40s they couldn’t do that. But we can.
We have not failed the test yet.
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I’m a SPWM (single parent with mortgage) who hugs my sons these days and realizes how I have taken my freedom to raise them and their freedom to be themselves absolutely for granted. And who earns every dollar I earn by writing. Having to replace my computer is leaving me short for the month [update — donations on the previous diary have partly solved that…! THANK YOU!] If you’d like to help keep it economically feasible for me to write on DKos, please consider sending a donation my way. Suggested amount $3. Thanks to all who have done so already. Your generosity humbles me. Especially those who’ve been particularly generous (you know who you are).
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2018 · 10:44:23 AM +00:00 · KM Wehrstein
Ursulafaw cites a story from The Atlantic:
The increasingly ontological cast of the debate continued Monday morning. Steve Doocy of Fox and Friends, the president’s favorite show, echoed Pollak’s line, saying that children weren’t being held in cages, but that authorities had “built walls out of chain-link fences.” Meanwhile, CBS News’s Gayle King was reporting from the border, where she described “cages.” The Border Patrol, CBS reported, took issue with that description, not because they felt it was inaccurate, but because they were “very uncomfortable” with the implication that the children were being treated like animals.
This morning Laura Ingraham said it’s essentially summer camp.
The Jews in Auschwitz weren’t people being massacred. They were cargo being processed. It wasn’t a Holocaust. It was a final solution.
This is how this is done.
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2018 · 10:55:53 AM +00:00 · KM Wehrstein
More action ideas have come up in the comments.
- Boycott businesses who are implicated via contracts with ICE, e.g. Microsoft, many of whose employees are apparently objecting. Publicize their names, contact them and demand they cut ties. (Mrmuni12, June 19 · 02:57:14 AM)
- Crowdfund a clearinghouse website to reunite families, “secure, lawyered up, heavily advertised and efficient” (sceptical observer, June 19 · 01:59:26 AM, more ideas in subcomments)
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2018 · 12:49:06 PM +00:00 · KM Wehrstein
Are the children being treated like animals?
Actually, worse.
The Roanoke Times, cited by Georgia Logothetis in today’s APR:
- The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that the children in the former Walmart in Brownsville are allowed outside for two hours a day — one hour for physical exercise, one hour for free time.
At the Roanoke Valley SPCA, each dog is taken out “a minimum of three times a day for a walk.” [...] So, yes, some of the dogs in our animal shelters get more outdoor exercise than these children incarcerated by the federal government.
- Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited one detention facility and said she was told that staffers were not allowed to touch the children, even to comfort them. [...]
By contrast, animals held at shelters routinely get petted as part of their socialization.
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2018 · 12:52:25 PM +00:00 · KM Wehrstein
Also from the APR: Jack Holmes says something I have been thinking myself, emphasis added:
[W}hen you see the inside of the facility, and combine it with what we know is happening here and elsewhere along the United States southern border, the lingering sense is that we are on the brink of a humanitarian disaster. And this is before we’ve built any tent city.
A state-sponsored purposeful humanitarian disaster. On American soil.