And while we've never been as high and mighty as our politicians tell us we are, while we've been assholes and fucked up on immigration policy, while we've cruelly been deporting people for minor reasons for years, it was never the actual policy of the United States to abuse children.
Right now, what else can you call the treatment of undocumented migrant children seeking asylum in the United States but child abuse, advocated, aided, and abetted by the federal government?
In the last week, a series of reports has continued to reveal that not only has the Trump administration, especially the Border Patrol, DHS, and HHS, done nothing to reform the mistreatment that occurred previously, but it has continued with the abuse and torture of children under the bullshit umbrella of "detention."
The Washington Post reported that thousands of unaccompanied children, some 12 and younger, are being held in Border Patrol facilities well past the three days that they are supposed to be held before they are released to HHS and the Office of Refugee Relocation to find them places to stay, whether with family already in the United States or foster families. And if you're thinking, "Well, a few extra days won't hurt anyone," here's what the Post said they saw on a visit to the border: "Adults and their toddler children were packed into concrete holding cells, many of them sleeping head-to-foot on the floor and along the wall-length benches....Outside in the parking lot, a chain-link fence enclosure held dozens of women and children, many of them eschewing the air-conditioned tents to lie on the pavement."
The Huffington Post reported that, at one detention facility in Homestead, Florida, according to a lawsuit recently filed, "Immigrant children described being put in isolation for eight days, deprived of physical touch and constantly sobbing." You're not allowed to touch anyone, not even a hug; you are watched by cameras at all times; you get two 10-minute calls with family a week, and tough shit if no one answers. They are living in a prison under prison-like rules without having even been accused of a crime. (Remember: It's totally legal to come here and ask for asylum.)
NBC News reported that documents they've obtained show the utter incompetence and chaos that raged when Trump's DHS was forced to reunify children with parents they had been forcefully separated from under the inhumane "Zero Tolerance" policy. These motherfuckers never had any intention of getting families back together; they wanted to punish people for daring to bring their brown, bedraggled asses to darken our virgin white City on a Hill. It was so bad that, outside one adult detention center in Texas, vans filled with children as young as five were backed up because they didn't have the people to process them. The kids were locked in the July 2018 Texas heat in the vans. "Not until 39 hours later — after two nights in a van — did the last child step out of a van to be reunited. Most spent at least 23 hours in the vehicles," the report says.
This aligns perfectly with the cruel revelation that few records were kept identifying which kids, some of whom are babies and toddlers, went with which families. It's taken nearly a year to get most of the couple of thousand kids reunited with their parents and loved ones. But they still haven't been able to do so for a few dozen. And it's not that their parents are criminals or some such shit. The government just don't know how to reunite them.
And this is not to mention the dead kids.
Or the fact that Trump wants to expand the detention centers into larger, full-fledged concentration camps rather than just release people on their own recognizance, the vast, vast majority of whom do show up for their court dates on asylum.
There's more. There's always more. About newborns separated from their mothers. About sexual abuse of kids in the detention centers. Mostly, it's about treating one category of humans as sub-human. Which, you know, is how racism works.
I'm tired of the quotidian cruelty of our leaders. The blithe assertion of brute power is one of the ugliest aspects of the grotesquely ugly ideology of conservatism. And to assert it over poor, sick, terrified kids in a nation we're constantly told is the richest, greatest, best in the history of the world just means that those leading it are abject, irredeemable dicks.
The faces of these kids should be part of any campaign against Republicans. They should have to answer for it. Because we should demand to not be a part of a country that thinks this shit is okay.
