May 27, 2018
This is how it begins. For weeks, we have read that the administration was going to separate children from their parents at the U.S. border to deter asylum seekers and other Latin American immigrants from coming to this country. Earlier this month, serial perjurer and committed racist, Jeff Sessions, announced that, as part of its stepped up prosecution of people crossing the border, ICE would separate children from their families, (Source: “U.S. says it will separate families crossing the border illegally,” by Jennifer McEntee, Mica Rosenberg, Reuters.com, 5/7/18). This was on the heels of a “zero tolerance” policy, announced in April, to treat each attempted border crossing as a federal offense to be prosecuted in court (ibid).Reporters, rightly alarmed by the cruelty of this draconian new policy, questioned White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, about the wisdom of making it official U.S. policy to rip children from their parents. Kelly’s chillingly cavalier response was that ”the children will be taken care of— put into foster care or whatever,” (Source: “Transcript: White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Interview with NPR,” by John Burnett, NPR.com, 5/11/18). In the same interview, Kelly admitted that the policy “could be a tough deterrent” for people seeking asylum or simply coming to this country in search of a better life. Stop for a minute and consider how callous you’d have to be to consider ripping a child from their parents’ arms as no big deal.
Trump has left no doubt that his vicious racism was the impetus for this monstrous policy by repeatedly denigrating undocumented people seeking to enter this country as “animals.” Trump baldly said that immigrants coming into the country “aren’t people. These are animals,”. The White House then doubled down and issued a press release entitled, “What You Need to Know About the Violent Animals of MS-13,” (Source: “How Dangerous Is It When Trump Calls Some Immigrants Animals?” by Aliza Luft and Daniel Solomon, The Washington Post, 5/25/18).
Given the rampant cruelty and heartless disregard for human life shown by every level of this administration, it is not surprising to learn that HHS lost track of nearly 1500 immigrant children! In Congressional hearings last month, administration officials admitted that the agency did not know the whereabouts of nearly 1500 immigrants who had arrived here as unaccompanied minors from October 2016 to December 2017, (Source: “HHS Official Says Agency Lost Track of Nearly 1500 Unaccompanied Minors,” by Leila Miller, Frontline, PBS.org, 4/26/18).The violence being perpetrated by our government against immigrants has rapidly escalated to a frightening level. On Wednesday, a Border Patrol agent shot and killed, Claudia Patricia Gomez Gonzalez, an unarmed woman apprehended with a group of immigrants in Rio Bravo, Texas (170 miles south of San Antonio). Gonzalez,a recent graduate with an accounting degree, was coming to the U.S. in search of work, after being unable to find it in her native Guatemala. Within minutes of stepping over the border, Gonzalez lay face down in the dirt, shot in the head by a U.S. Border Patrol Agent (Source: “She came to the U.S. for a better life. Moments after arrival she was killed,” by Nicole Chavez, CNN.com, 5/27/18).
This is being done in our name, funded by our tax dollars and we are all complicit. We must do everything in our power to stop it, or we are no better than the monsters we decry. This is how it starts. If we don’t act, we all know how it will end.
#WherearetheChildren?
#ACLUImmigrantsRightsProject
#DemandCongressionalOversight