Terrorist

That is the best word to describe President Donald Trump.

A terrorist is one who deliberately seeks to inflict mass fear and panic, usually in pursuit of a political agenda. Donald Trump has been doing that from his first day in office, targeting innocent people with the wrong place of birth, a different religion, a darker skin tone.

Immigrants from the shithole countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia have borne the brunt of the xenophobia he has supercharged and made the policy of the state. By the legions, they have been terrorized—Muslims, Mexicans, Central Americans. Too scared to leave their homes except when absolutely necessary, avoiding seeking health care or reporting crime, they live diminished lives since Donald Trump unleashed and unmuzzled the immigration enforcement dogs.

Terrorism is usually indiscriminate in its method, attacking “soft targets,” innocent women, children, and men. But terrorism is seldom indiscriminate in its targets. Often, the victims are scapegoats chosen to further a political agenda wrapped in religion. Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, Muslims in a mosque in New Zealand, Coptic Christians in Egypt, are not victims chosen at random. 

If this sounds as written in a higher emotional chord than usual that is because for me this is not just an issue of state policy, state crime, and state injustice. This is personal. My anger at Trump and his miserable of administration of toadies, billionaires, bigots and bullies is not abstract.

I am an immigrant. I came at the age of ten, an unaccompanied minor by the definition of the Trump administration. The woman who brought me, along with her four children, was not a relative but a less-than-close friend of the family, chosen by my parents because she was a good person and had an early departure date. It was a time when panicked Cuban middle-class families, believing false rumors stoked by Castro opponents and the U.S. that children would be made wards of the state, forcibly removed from their parents, and sent to the Soviet Union, rushed to send their children out of the country.

I was not separated from my adult lifeline for weeks and months as has become standard practice under this administration. I was not put in a cage. I was not saddled for life with a psychological trauma created by a policy that amounts to state terror.  Instead, I was cared for by a woman with healthy maternal instincts, played with her children, lived in a regular neighborhood, attended the local school, Silver Bluff Elementary, here in Miami. I got through the fifth grade thanks to the English I learned in the bilingual school my parents had sent me to, at great monetary sacrifice, in Cuba, and Mrs. Dundon, the wonderful, kind teacher that shepherded me over that first school year.

How has this country become so much meaner since? 

Donald Trump empowered, supercharged and legitimized the unacknowledged meanness that had been there under the surface all along among some people. I learned of that the very first day in school when I overheard the word spic and asked what it meant.

Donald Trump made those subterranean prejudices policy. This is what he wrought.

“A 705-page court document filed by lawyers who spent substantial time inside Homestead’s detention center for unaccompanied minors says the migrant children held there are subjected to ‘prison-like’ regimens, potentially sustaining permanent psychological damage due to isolation from loved ones.

“Based on interviews with detainees, the filing describes dumbfounded and despairing children, cut off from their relatives except for phone calls, enduring ‘military-camp’ style conditions and stays that often stretch into months.

“It is by far the most detailed description of life inside the secretive detention center, although the stories are relayed through the prism of adults advocates who want to see the children moved to smaller settings — the number of children in the facility is 2,350 and growing — or released to the care of family or other guardians.

‘“I interviewed many children that were in such distress that they cut themselves,”’ attorney Neha Desai told the Miami Herald. She was one of several attorneys who was allowed to interview children away from the camp operators.

“She recounted the story of a 14-year-old girl from Honduras whose mom died from cancer when the girl was 8.

“‘Her aunt took over as her parent. Years later they crossed the border together, but were forcibly separated,’ Desai said of the girl, who said she had been detained for eight months at the time of the interview. “The girl was never told where she was being taken or why. Her aunt was placed in ICE [Immigrant and Customs Enforcement] detention elsewhere while her niece was taken to Homestead… She started to cut herself.’” [Monique O. Madan, The Miami Herald, June 2, 2019]

Caging children is a crime; if the state does it, then it is a state crime. Donald Trump is a criminal as head of the state that perpetrates that outrage. Criminal subspecies: terrorist. The entire purpose of the cruelty of Trump’s immigration policy is to out-brutalize the brutes of the Central American gangs that rule most of the streets there. Inflict a greater terror so they will stop coming. Kidnapping children from their parent’s arms is a good start at becoming as heinous as the worst drug and extortion gang. Trump thinks he can win such a perverse contest and he is doing everything he can to achieve it.