Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Family Values in the Age of Trump

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

The Florence Project, a non-profit group set up to assist arriving refugees as they cross into the United States from Mexico, says that there have been over 200 cases of immigrant children being taken from their parents in Arizona alone this year.  And the child-snatchers aren't desperadoes tied to a human-trafficking gang.  No, the villains who are taking terrorized, screaming children from the arms of their equally terrorized parents are representatives of the United States government.  The children are quickly warehoused and then placed into "foster care or whatever."

Many of these traumatized kids have no idea what is happening to them - or the fate that awaits them.    They are literally strangers trapped and alone in a strange land.  The parents, often on the run from terror at home, now find themselves struggling to find and reclaim the most important people in their lives.

And in Washington, DC, it's still cocktails at five as our political elite slap each other on the backs and toast "family values."

Donald Trump blames this government child-grabbing on a "horrible law" enacted by Democrats, a "horrible law" that, in fact, sprang from Trump's imagination one day as he was tweeting bile to his MAGA masses.  The child-grabbing was actually the result of a policy implemented earlier in the year by the Trump administration itself.

And what happens to these purloined children.   1,475 of them have disappeared.  That's right.  Our government has misplaced almost fifteen hundred of the children that it forcibly took from their parents.   Some have probably found their way back to the safety of family members, but others may have fallen prey to human traffickers and are trapped in the darkness of America's criminal underbelly.  Who knows the fate of these children?  Immigration and Customs Enforcement clearly does not have a clue.

Ripping children from the arms of their parents is a deliberate policy of the Trump administration, one designed to discourage people from trying to cross into the United States.  All adults entering the United States through Mexico are now subject to detainment, even those who seek entry for humanitarian reasons.  They are incarcerated as they wait for a hearing, and their children are detained elsewhere.  It is a system designed to inflict as much horror as possible onto the new arrivals.

But Donald Trump and underlings with badges and guns can live with that.  These brown invaders aren't people, after all, they're animals.

America has a lot to answer for in the age of Trump.

1 comment:

Xobekim said...

I'd love to think that it was just Trump's unbridled idiocy at work, but I suspect the situation is more devious. The ruling oligarch's obsession with privatization makes me wonder if these kids aren't being farmed out to privatized juvenile detention centers.

That when Trump appears to screw up other rich people suddenly find themselves enriched by the error is a too often recurring theme of this Administration. If this is the case about these children then these atrocities for profit must carry appropriate criminal sanctions.