This Is a Fight Over What It Means to Be an American
The Trump administration's border policies are a story about America at its very core.
The stories come thick and fast now, as the crimes against humanity being committed along the southern border of the country begin to metastasize to other states, drawing them into accessorial conduct after the fact. They have begun to fall so thick and fast that we've probably forgotten already the death of Marco Antonio Munoz, a Honduran man who, authorities say, killed himself in custody after having been separated from his wife and child, according to The New York Times.
While at the processing center, the Customs and Border Protection spokesman said, Mr. Muñoz "became disruptive and combative," so the authorities moved him to a jail in Starr County, Tex. — about 40 miles west of the processing center — for an overnight stay. Although the statement did not say whether Mr. Muñoz was with family members at the border, or explain why he became combative, media outlets reported that he grew upset after learning that his family would be split up. A public report posted by the Texas attorney general says Mr. Muñoz, 39, was booked into the jail the night of May 12. He was "combative and noncompliant" and scuffled with a detention officer, the report said, before being placed in a padded cell late that night. Throughout the evening, officers checked on Mr. Muñoz every 30 minutes, the report said, but during the morning shift, different officers found Mr. Muñoz dead on the floor.
Ignore for the moment that this sounds like every bogus death-in-custody story ever concocted by a law-enforcement agency to cover its ass, and think about how cold a lizard you have to be to wonder why a guy would be "disruptive and combative" while you're kidnapping his children right in front of him. Where was Mr. Munoz buried, I wonder?
But that was all of a couple of weeks ago. On Wednesday, the big story was the revelation by the Associated Press that hijacked babies and toddlers are being held in what are called "Tender Age Facilities," a euphemism that would have driven George Orwell to get out of the business.
Decades after the nation's child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is starting up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.
"The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it," said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides foster care and other child welfare services to migrant children. "Toddlers are being detained."
Getty Images
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Bellor said shelters follow strict procedures surrounding who can gain access to the children in order to protect their safety, but that means information about their welfare can be limited. By law, child migrants traveling alone must be sent to facilities run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services within three days of being detained. The agency then is responsible for placing the children in shelters or foster homes until they are united with a relative or sponsor in the community as they await immigration court hearings.
But U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' announcement last month that the government would criminally prosecute everyone who crosses the U.S.-Mexico border illegally has led to the breakup of migrant families and sent a new group of hundreds of young children into the government's care.
(Here is the beginning of a famous propaganda film from the 1940s entitled The Fuhrer Gives a City to the Jews, about the "paradise ghetto" of Theresienstadt in occupied Czechoslovakia. I can't imagine what brought this to mind in light of Tender Age Facilities, but it does reinforce the proposition of Mr. Spade of San Francisco: The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.)
After this came the story about infants once caged at the border being flown off to foster care and group homes and hell and gone, including places in Michigan. From The Detroit Free Press:
…in the middle of the night, two baby boys arrived in Grand Rapids after being separated from their immigrant parents at the southern border weeks ago. One child is 8 months old; the other is 11 months old. Both children have become part of a bigger group of 50 immigrant children who have landed in foster care in western Michigan under the Trump administration's zero-tolerance border policy. The average age of these children is 8, a number that has alarmed foster care employees who are struggling to comfort the growing group of kids who are turning up in Michigan at nighttime, when it's pitch-dark outside. They're younger than ever, they say. And they are petrified.
"These kids are arriving between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Not only are they being separated from their family, they are being transported to a place that they don't know in the middle of the night," said Hannah Mills, program supervisor for the transitional foster care program at Bethany Christian Services, which is currently assisting the displaced children. "We have found on many occasions that no one has explained to these children where they are going." According to Mills, some of these displaced children got picked up right at the airport by a foster family, while others wound up at a foster care center, begging to talk to their parents. Many have gone 30 days or more without talking to their parents because their parents can't be located, she said.
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Nor, likely, will they ever. Welcome to Michigan, youngsters. Go Blue!
Getty Images
On Tuesday night, dropping by Lawrence O'Donnell's show on MSNBC, Chris Hayes, who remains the terrific reporter he was long before he became a TV star, pointed out something that has gone largely unremarked in the explosion of news, opinion, and outrage that has erupted in the past two weeks: Namely, that these children are moving from trauma, through trauma, and into trauma, with almost no relief along the way.
The links in the chain go all the way back to the northern triangle in Honduras and Guatemala and people are making the decision to come here because they are facing the most unimaginable personal terror. They're not on the thousand-mile journey for any other reason. What the Trump Administration has entered into is a war of terror with the cartels in Central America, in which they [the administration*] have now said we must terrorize people more than the cartels are terrifying people in their home countries so they don't come here. That is a bidding war that is ghastly, and a moral abomination, and one I pray that we cannot possibly win.
(Some day we will have to have a historical accounting of the American policy regarding Central America that created what seems to be eternal chaos in that region. This will severely discomfort the current Never Trump Republicans who still cling to Ronald Reagan as their beau ideal of a president. People like, oh, say, Steve Schmidt.)
Elsewhere, the president* announced on Wednesday that he will be signing an executive order declaring a hiatus in the child-seizing protocol. (The zero-tolerance policy apparently will remain in effect, but, hey, his humanity's in the mail!) It seems, however, according to the Times, that he can't do that without making an awful legal mess for himself. Helping with this is Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, who was heckled out of a Mexican restaurant on Tuesday night and, apparently, would like to go out in the streets of Washington again without a bag over her head.
Getty Images
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
The puzzle, of course, is why he needs a new executive order when he simply could end the policy with a single phone call to Nielsen or Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, but they're not speaking right now, so maybe that's the explanation. He then went off to meet with Republican congresscritters, who managed to look ever more obsequious on television but who were exceeded in suck-up-i-tude by Vice President Mike Pence, whose bootlicking skills are unsurpassed by anyone since the Bourbon monarchies went out of business. At the end, of course, he went very long on both meretricious Obama-blame and strange bullshit.
"We are not going to let people from the Middle East using children to cross our borders."
Oy.
The most important thing to do about this ongoing story, and the roiling boil of outrage it has prompted, is to keep it from centering itself in Washington. Toothless compromises are being offered by the timorous Republican congressional majorities. The president* is just charlatan enough to swoop in behind one of these Potemkin bills, beat his chest for his deal-making prowess in "solving" a catastrophe of his own making, and then run on it this fall, while they're still shipping unaccompanied infants and toddlers off to god-alone-knows-where.
This is an American story that is taking place over the length and breadth of this country. It is a fight over the essential nature of what an American is, and what being an American always has been. The story is the country, not its feckless, complicit, and increasingly ridiculous government.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment