December 15, 2018
It is tough to feel the holiday spirit while drowning in a maelstrom of news of this administration’s unrelenting cruelty. Republicans in Washington and across the country have responded to electoral losses and escalating legal jeopardy by attacking the very principle of representative democracy and doubling down on viciously racist policies, impervious to criticism and heedless of the human cost.
Late Thursday we learned that seven year old Guatemalan refugee, Jakelin Caal died of acute dehydration on December 6th, in the United States after 8 hours in the custody of Customs and Border Patrol. Jakelin and her father were part of a group of 161 Guatemalan refugees who presented themselves at the border in New Mexico, seeking asylum, as is their legal right.
Jakelin spent those 8 hours in custody in an unheated garage which lacked blankets, benches, or seating of any kind. As CBP was prioritizing unaccompanied minors, by the time Jakelin and her father got on the buses to be processed, she was already in acute distress. By the time she was finally airlifted to a hospital, it was too late to save her. DHS responded to this tragedy initially by trying to hide the news, and then by trying to blame her father for exercising his legal right to seek asylum, (Source: “A dying migrant child’s condition went unnoticed for hours. Then she collapsed in U.S. custody,” by Nick Miroff, The Washington Post, 12/14/18).
It is deeply disturbing, but unsurprising, that distaff Goebbels, DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen would recklessly absolve her agency of responsibility in the tragic, and probably preventable, death of a young child in U.S.custody. It is just the latest in a long series of incidents that reveal the racial animus at the heart of every administration policy.
Just this past week, the Trump administration announced it was reversing long held policy toward the children of Vietnamese refugees who arrived prior to 1995, the date that the U.S. normalized relations with Vietnam. Departing from the policy of both the Obama and Bush administrations, Trump announced that all Vietnamese people who arrived prior to 1995 would be at risk of deportation, rather than just those convicted of crimes. This needlessly cruel policy ignores the fact many of those who arrived prior to 1995 were the children of those who assisted American forces in Vietnam and would be in danger of persecution in Vietnam today, (Source: “Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees,” by Charles Dunst and Krishnadev Calamir, TheAtlantic.com, 12/12/18).
As Adam Serwer so succinctly put it, with this administration, cruelty is the point. The Trump administration’s cruelty is targeted to inflict maximum pain, even to the point of death, on those of us that they hate and fear. We should anticipate that, the more the mounting investigations close in on Trump, the more he will direct his administration to ratchet up their attacks on people of color, in order to shore up his support among his dwindling base of diehard racists.
Those chronicling the downfall of this criminal cabal need to stop covering our politics like a reality show or a football game with winners and losers. They need to be sure that their toxic combination of myopia and hubris doesn’t cause them to minimize the harm that real people will suffer while they breathlessly wait for impeachment or 2020. This time, those that “missed” the rise of white supremacy had better listen to those of us who saw it from the start.