With all the conniptions about Kavanaugh and the horrible injustices facing rich, white, straight men and the fact that the president is more or less a felonious tax cheat, there is another issue that we all seem to have forgotten about.
Yes, I’m talking about the fact that“in shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses … for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.”
This is the continuation of the Trump Administration’s nightmarish zero-tolerance approach to border enforcement, which as you recall, led to kids being ripped out of their parents’ arms, Americans becoming horrified at our government’s inhumane behavior, and conservatives shrugging and saying, “Eh, what can you do?”
Even though U.S. courts ordered the administration to reunite immigrant families, the White House missed the deadline, which is essentially just another grotesque fuck-up in a long line of staggering incompetence. Now, with even more kids showing up unaccompanied the border, “the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children— the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.”
In these tent cities — where there is no education and access to legal services is limited — the average length of time that migrant kids have spent “in custody has nearly doubled … from 34 days to 59 days.”Studies have down that “the longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts.”
And of course, yanking children out of bed in the middle of the night “without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “There must be a good reason why the Trump Administration hasn’t reunited these families and/or developed a halfway decent plan for taking care of these kids.”
Well, the joke is on you — and me and all Americans and every immigrant child in this morass of madness.
Because the truth is that the administration never had a plan for how to deal with this crisis of its own making. Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security “was not ready to carry out the Trump Administration’s family separation policy, and some of the government’s practices made the problem worse.”
As such, the White House has basically admitted, “Oh shit, we didn’t expect Americans to actually want us to get those kids back to their parents. Our bad.”
Clearly, the president is completely indifferent to the plight of Latinos, immigrants, children, and most especially, Latino immigrant children. This sociopathic blasé attitude toward human suffering is one of the chief characteristics of the Trump Administration. The other is bumbling ineptitude. Put them together, and you have an inevitable dynamo clusterfuck.
In addition, it is only now that the administration is starting to catch on to the fact that destroying families and terrorizing children actually costs money. So the president has “diverted nearly $10 millionin funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
As critics (i.e., sane and/or decent human beings) point out, the administration is paying “for this horrific program by taking away from the ability to respond to damage from this year’s upcoming and potentially devastating hurricane season” even as “American citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still suffering from FEMA’s inadequate recovery efforts.”
In total, the Department of Homeland Security has “transferred $169 million from other agencies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the detention and removal of migrants this year.” Documents show that much of the money “was taken from the response and recovery, preparedness and protection and mission support operations budgets, which are used to prepare for emergencies.”
To keep things in perspective, “the Trump Administration would rather separate families and detain and deport parents [than] prepare for hurricanes.”
If one tried, it might be possible to come up with a more costly, delusional, self-destructive, brutalizing system.
But I doubt it.
