Even though one of America’s most prolific liars claims that he and his administration are “doing a fantastic job” caring for children of asylum-seekers in camps on the southern border, do you wonder . . . who willingly locks up those children in deplorable conditions in chain-link cages?
Who stands by in cowering silence while their inaction forces innocent children who’ve arbitrarily been separated from their families to go hungry, sleep on concrete floors, not bathe for days at a time, not even brush their teeth, and in many cases, due to overcrowding, suffer from illnesses and lice infestations?
Who in America does that?
According to privileged white people in power like Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and Republicans who dominated Congress for the first two years of the Trump administration yet did nothing about immigration, the so-called leaders of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), are doing a “fantastic job”.
Representing the Trump administration, government lawyer Sarah Fabian even went so far as to argue before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last Tuesday that requiring children to sleep on cold concrete floors in cells and withholding blankets, diapers, soap and toothpaste from those children is “safe and sanitary.”
According to Donald Trump, a man who shockingly believes he commands the respect necessary to win the 2020 election, the new standard for the treatment of innocent children is misery.
Shep Smith of FOX News said yesterday that “Soap and toothbrushes are not optional for children in detention. They are necessary. Were these particular children prisoners of war rather than innocent children, failure to provide those necessities would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions.”
With thanks and respect to Shep Smith for daring to tell an obvious truth, the real question is who willingly stands by and does nothing while children are effectively tortured simply because their parents chose to seek asylum in the land of freedom and opportunity?
Who?
While we know about the xenophobic hatred that drove the leader of the Third Reich and his senior military officers, and administrators to force Jewish children to endure similar conditions in camps throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945, how did the men and women who did the dirty work . . . clerks, guards, and maintenance workers . . . go home each evening and have supper with their families, laugh and play with their healthy, happy, and safe children and tuck them into bed with a smile and a kiss knowing that within hours they’d be back at ‘work’ in the camps?
One wonders now . . . how do CBP staff who spend their days overseeing dirty, hungry, lice-infested, sick children locked in cages go home each evening, have supper with their families, laugh and play with their healthy, happy, and safe children and tuck them into bed with a smile and a kiss knowing that within hours, they’ll be back at ‘work’?
Do you wonder if the millions of heroic men and women who’ve given their lives to protect and preserve this democracy made the ultimate sacrifice so these people could do this?
Do you?