Weaponizing children
MIAMI – The Catholic Archbishop of Miami, Father Thomas Wenski, said it better than anyone. Trump’s new immigration tactic of forcibly separating children from their parents at the Mexico-U.S. border amounts to weaponizing children.
The statement, uttered by Wenski this weekend in response to a question by CBS-4 reporter Jim DeFede, belies the various and often conflicting pretexts and rationalizations the Trump administration has used to justify the unjustifiable.
Better than anything that has been said amid an outpouring of righteous outrage among millions of people here and around the world, Wenski’s words cut right to the government’s real intention, the actual reason for the policy. It amounts to holding children hostage and housing them in cages as a way of punishing their parents for crossing the border without legal authorization, and to put a great fear in the hearts of others who might try to do the same it in the future.
The practice of weaponizing children is immediately, almost instinctively, recognized by the vast majority of people as abhorrent. It is ugly on its face, visibly cruel in its consequences. The administration has tried its full bag of tricks to deceive, conceal, and distort what is happening and why. Trump and his minions in charge of implementing the anti-immigrant crusade are directly responsible for the separation policy, which is unprecedented in scale and inflexibility.
It is not the legacy of Obama, or previous administrations, or the Democrats, or a broken immigration system, or Congress, or some law. It’s a product of a deliberate and perverse strategy. A strategy for keeping people from shithole countries from coming here. It’s your baby, Mr. Trump, stop trying to shift the blame, or minimize your guilt, or try to have it both ways. Own it.
For Trump’s apologists, this time nothing has worked, and nothing will work. In the face of withering criticism from the religious community, including the Southern Baptist Convention and key conservative evangelical leaders. The main implementer of the new strategy, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, delivered a Biblical justification, although he looked like he was having trouble keeping a straight face when he said it, or else he thought that in invoking St. Paul, he had come up with something clever. That this was a precooked-administration-talking-point became evident when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president’s official apologist, repeated the Biblical justification.
That didn’t fly either. Indignant religious leaders dismissed the argument. On the policy of separating families, Sanders has been pressed harder by the White House press corps that on any other issue. She tried to put up a good front at first but was visibly rattled and no longer in control of the room as the barrage continued.
The White House called in reinforcements in the person of Homeland Security Secretary Kristen Jen Nielsen. She couldn’t contain the firestorm either but added fuel by repeating the administration’s lies and distortions, and through her inability or unwillingness to provide basic facts about the situation on the ground. To the media’s simple and persistent question, “Where are the [detained] girls?”, which have not been seen in any of the scant photographs the government has released, she could give no answer. Instead she gave evidence of the lack of coordination among the agencies carrying out this sordid operation. Nielsen displayed the hallmark traits of the Trump administration, profound moral tone-deafness and incompetence. No wonder that after lambasting her for being soft on immigration, Trump now has jumped in to defend Nielsen.
The administration’s problem is that this situation is way beyond the power of public relations. It evokes collective memories of Native American children being taken away from their parents, aboriginal children in Australia suffering the same fate for decades, Cambodian children abducted by the Khmer Rouge, and Jewish children dragged away from their parents by the Nazis bent on “the final solution to the Jewish problem,” in effect killing every last Jew in Europe.
Ugly doesn’t cover it. It’s a hideous picture of the nation visible to the whole world. Republicans, unlike the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, don’t care about “the …opinion of mankind,” but GOP members of Congress are scared that this moral debacle will have adverse implications for their party in the next election and for decades to come.
By now everyone has seen the scarce but heartrending images and heard the cries of children calling for their parents. Indelible images: These scenes are too primal to bullshit away. They respond to instincts inscribed very deep in the mammalian genome. God help the Border Patrol if they are ever tasked with dragging cubs from a mother bear.
Let’s be clear about what we are witnessing so that later no one can claim they didn’t know. This is a crime, in fact a series of unconscionable crimes, child abuse among them. It’s not just an affront to American values. It’s an aggression against the very essence of human nature and that of every social species on the planet.
Let’s not be silent. Let’s raise hell. Already, this weekend protestors booed the Homeland Security Secretary out of an upscale Mexican restaurant in Washington. Let’s hold the Trumps, the Nielsens, and the Sessions of this world accountable for what they are doing and, within the bounds of the law and the principle of human decency, make the rest of their lives as miserable as those of many of these children are bound to be.
POSTSCRIPT
After this column was completed, President Trump signed an executive order temporarily stopping the separation of families. This was no magnanimous gesture. It was a move to relieve unsustainable pressure from the two-thirds of the U.S. public who oppose the policy, scared Republican members of Congress seeking reelection in November, sharp criticism from religious leaders from Pope Francis to evangelicals such as Franklin Graham (Billy Graham’s son), and pleas from his wife Melania (an immigrant) and daughter Ivanka. But the executive order is only stopgap and leaves open many questions, including what happens next, especially to the 2,000-plus children already separated from their families. What is clear is that we must keep up the pressure as Trump is determined to maintain his zero-conscience policy of prosecuting people as criminals who are simply fleeing for their lives . Look for an update in next week’s column.
