For several days I’ve been trying to gather enough thoughts to write about the travesty taking place along our southern border, but it’s hard for right-thinking individuals to grasp the magnitude of an administration policy that incarcerates young children without their parents in a country where they probably don’t speak the language and have no concept of what’s being done to them.
I don’t care what party you belong to or who you support
politically or what you believe morally or philosophically, you would have to agree
that this abhorrent practice is wrong. In fact, it is so far beyond wrong that I’m not sure there’s
even a word for it yet. And if you somehow don’t
agree that this is wrong, then I’d suggest you have your own children dragged
off crying and screaming to the nearest dog kennel where they would be thrown
into cages and left there indefinitely by guardians who aren’t allowed to touch
them or hug them or comfort them in any way.
If that doesn’t make you see the light, then you’re not fit
to share the same air that decent people breathe.
In case you arrived late, here are a few facts:
* In early February 2017, just days after President Trump took
office, his administration began weighing what was called “the nuclear option” to
discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the country. Under the
policy, according to The New York Times,
“Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been
apprehended entering the country illegally…in order to deter more movement
along this terribly dangerous network.”
To emphasize, that happened during February into March 2017...more
than 15 months before it caught the media’s attention.
“Advocates inside the administration, most prominently
Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea,” The Times continued. “Last month,
facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Mr. Trump ordered a new
effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully – with few
exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children.”
Miller, the white supremacist neo-Nazi who is the chief
policy adviser to our faux president, called it “a simple decision” to enforce a
zero tolerance policy at the border, the message being that “no one is exempt
from immigration law.”
A little background on Stephen Miller:
* The 2007 Duke University graduate began polishing his white
supremacist ideals in college, where he wrote conservative columns for the
school newspaper and became well-known for defending white Duke lacrosse players
accused of raping a black exotic dancer – even before all of the facts of the
case were known. The basis for his position was, apparently, that the players
were white and the dancer was not and therefore they must be innocent.
* He once called Maya Angelou a “racial paranoid” and helped Richard
Spencer, another Duke graduate, raise funds for an anti-immigration organization
of which they were both members. Spencer would later become an important figure
in the white supremacist movement and president of the National Policy
Institute, and is famous for coining the term "alt-right."
* After college, Miller worked as a press secretary for nut-job
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and later for an Alabama senator
and future attorney general named (wait for it)…Jeff Sessions, commandant of
Trump’s (and Miller’s) new no tolerance border policy.
There’s more, but you can google him for the full story.
Back to the policy, this immoral practice of separating
children from parents had been going on for a few weeks when images started to
appear of a small child crying while her mother was frisked and, later,
children housed in chain-link cages inside an abandoned Texas Walmart. Asked
about the policy, Trump originally blamed the Democrats and said, like
everything else wrong with this country, it must have been Obama’s fault.
Subsequently, Press Secretary Sarah the Prevaricator Sanders
first denied that the zero tolerance dictum was a new policy and claimed it was
existing law. Then, both she and AG Sessions quoted the Bible to justify the enforcement
of a law that actually doesn’t exist.
But wait! A day or so later, a spokesperson for the Department
of Homeland Security admitted that 1,995 minors were separated from their families
at the southern border between April 19 and the end of May of this year under the administration's “relatively new zero tolerance
policy.” This is the same new policy that the White House had openly denied.
Next, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen walked back the comment
on June 17, saying, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the
border. Period.” That was a apparently a lie, because a day later she defended
the practice and claimed that the children who had been separated from their
families were being well cared for, although she admitted she didn’t know where
they are.
So to recap: One day we “do not separate families at the
border” and a day later the children who have been separated from their parents
“are being well cared for.” This all prompted no less than William Kristol, the
very conservative political analyst and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, to tweet:
Trump:
The Democrats made us do it.
Stephen
Miller: It's our policy to do it.
Sec.
Nielsen: We're not doing it.
Or, as I'd put it, for an administration that lies about everything all of the time, these people really aren't very good at it.
Now, Trump says it’s up to Congress to fix the problem and
the Democrats are “obstructing” that effort, but ask yourself this: How hard
would it be for Trump to pick up a phone, call House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate
President Mitch McConnell and tell them to get this done. In case you’ve been
in a coma for a few years, you know that the Republicans control both houses of
Congress, so getting this problem fixed should be one of the easiest things Trump
has ever done.
Instead, he’d rather tweet nonsense and whine about
Democrats and Obama and anything else that crosses his mind except for a real solution
to a very serious issue.
In conclusion, I still can’t fully grasp the magnitude of what
the United States of America is doing to innocent children, most of whom came
here with their parents to escape deplorable conditions in their home countries
and to seek safety in the country that is guarded by the Statue of Liberty. They are the very definition of the people described on the base of Lady Liberty -- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
It boggles
the mind the way they are being treated, and it makes me want to cry.
This much I know. Until recently, I believed that of all the
evil things Donald Trump has done, the one that should have automatically disqualified
him to be president was his mocking of a disabled reporter who was on the
campaign trail doing his job. Now, I’m convinced that that episode -- disgusting as it was -- comes in a distant second
to the government-sanctioned child abuse taking place under Trump’s watch in Texas
and other border states.
This not only disqualifies Trump as our president, in my
mind, but as a human being as well. Anyone who continues to support him and,
god forbid, votes for him again should be rocketed into space with no return
vehicle or set adrift without food or water on a raft in the middle of the
ocean.
I also hope that with this national disgrace hanging from their
necks, Republicans in Congress will soon find themselves without a job while sanity returns to America. As I always say, elections have consequences.
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