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| photo by Bill Strain / flickr |
On memorial Day I remember reading Sebastian Junger's book Tribe several years ago. I recommend it to everyone. It tells the story of many of those veterans that came back from deployment after deployment--some up to five and six times. But when they got back to our country many looked around at the warring, the hatred, the jockeying for power and money--the lies and deceptions and asked, "Is this what we were fighting for?" Good question.
Nothing has bothered me so much lately--and that takes in a lot of territory- than the almost-unbelievable story of how our government is separating immigrant children from their parents. Not even when we incarcerated Japanese citizens against their will did we separate parents and children. Talk about Family values. My God--what kind of a people have we come to be. And even more--where is the outrage?
We have no law mandating separation. The closest is the Trump administration's own "zero tolerance" policy. Couple this sad sage with all the Dreamers who are still left in limbo and we wonder about this country. Read the following story. We just do more than shake our heads and get depressed. --RL
| What is happening to immigrant children is an abomination A top official from the Department of Health and Human Services told Congress that HHS lost nearly 1,500 migrant children it had placed into homes. There is now widespread fear that the children could be in the hands of human traffickers. An ACLU report this week revealed that immigrant children suffer “pervasive abuse” while in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. As part of a "zero tolerance" border policy meant to deter immigrants from coming, the Trump administration is now separating parents from children. The results are horrific, and it is incredibly challenging for parents and children to reunite. Trump is trying to blame Democrats, but this policy of separating children was his own personal directive. Instead of covering this major scandal, Sunday shows looked away. Three of them didn't cover the issue at all. On CNN, the controversy was grist for paid CNN commentator Rick Santorum to call missing children not a real issue. On Fox News, meanwhile, an anti-immigrant guest was only concerned about the missing children because it would be harder to deport them back to the violence they were fleeing in the first place. Right-wing media have accused these children for years of being part of a conspiracy to infiltrate the United States in order to vote for Democrats. It's no wonder that many Republicans believe the lie -- it's all they hear. The truth is that these children are fleeing violence and looking for a better life. Instead of covering this story and the challenge of instituting a humane policy, right-wing media figures mock migrant children. They falsely blamemigrant children for illnesses, baselessly accuse them of being responsible for America's low education ranking, and use debunked data to wrongly assert that immigrants are an economic burden. In one case, conservative media even pushed a charity to abandon its plans to help the migrant children. Meanwhile: The acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) went on Fox & Friends, where he pushed a sob story about his agency being demonized. The fact is that ICE is wrongly categorizingimmigrants as gang members in order to deport them. And even worse, Trump himself told Fox in an interview that he wants to get rid of immigration courts entirely.
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