The Trumpers carefully planned to traumatize children
I’ve seen headlines saying the Trump administration started grabbing children away from their parents at the southern border a lot earlier than it had admitted, but I didn’t follow them up. I should have. The law library blog at Stanford collected some blood-chilling details.
Via Truthdig:
Following reports on Thursday that federal officials forcibly separated thousands more migrant children from their families than previously reported, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.) released a document to NBC News revealing the Trump administration intended to “traumatize children and intentionally create a humanitarian crisis at the border.”
…
The December 2017 draft memo—which Merkley shared with NBC News after receiving it from a government whistleblower—shows that Trump administration officials wanted to deport children more quickly by denying them asylum hearings after taking them away from their parents.
Toss a few more on the vast pile of lies we know the Trump administration has told about its cruel family separation policy. Sen. Jeff Merkley released a draft memo, leaked by a whistleblower, showing that the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security thoroughly gamed out different ways they could tear children from their parents and use it as a deterrent to keep migrants from seeking asylum at the border.
The memo dates to December 2017, when border crossings were dramatically lower than in December 2016, yet is titled “Policy Options to Respond to Border Surge of Illegal Immigration.” In the memo and in comments on it, Trump administration officials floated the possibility of taking children from their parents but then denying them a hearing before an immigration judge and deporting the whole family—without necessarily reunifying them first. “It appears that they wanted to have it both ways,” ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said. “To separate children from their parents but deny them the full protections generally awarded to unaccompanied children.”
The draft memo also considered restricting green cards available to abused, abandoned, or neglected children, as well as previewing the policy of intensive background checks of people who agreed to sponsor unaccompanied migrant children. Publicly, the Trump administration claims that this is for the safety of the children—children they held in detention camps—but the memo acknowledged that the policy would lead to kids being held longer.
A lot of Trump administration policies are based on whim-tweets by Donald Trump and then implemented by his loyal flunkies. This was not. This was carefully gamed-out cruelty to children.
And to parents through their children, which is excruciating, and monstrous.
The … individuals … who carry out these plans. What do they do at the end of their shift? Go home to a family dinner? Cut the lawn, walk the dog, coach the kids’ sportsball team? Go to church on Sunday and thank god for making them American? Sleep at night? Pretend to be human?
chigau, I would predict they do just that. I suspect they have rationalized the hell out of this, until they see it as just another day spent opening letters at the office. It is just a job. Or maybe more – it is required to protect their own children. That’s probably how they live with it.
This is one of the more vile actions of the administration among piles and piles of vile.
Yep. If the rise of the Nazis in pre-WWII taught us nothing else, it taught us the banality of evil. These monsters are the good neighbors, the faithful, lovers of animals, PTA volunteers. They are us.*
*In before someone says “not all people!!”: NAPALT.
James Garnett @3,
Yep. Which is why I’m underwhelmed when the “civility police” wax rhapsodic about some anecdote in which Charlie Conservative and Larry Liberal were “able” to have lunch together politely or whatever, and how this is a beacon to the rest of us.
I have no doubt that I could have a lengthy, polite, and even friendly conversation with, say, Rush Limbaugh, about football, whiskey, cigars, and other apolitical topics. For that matter, I probably have discussed football, whiskey, and cigars with people whose politics I would have found repugnant had the subject come up. I’m sort of mystified by what people think that’s supposed to prove. I’ve never thought that everyone whose politics differs from mine is evil, and I’ve certainly never thought that even evil people are incapable of having polite conversations, especially on banal subjects.
I guess if you have a child’s view of morality, where the bad people wear black hats and twirl their moustaches while declaring how EEEEEEVIL they are, then this would shake things up — which is exactly why I find the “let’s have Blue America and Red America go out for a coffee and a chat!” thing so patronizing.