Obama did it. Roger That!
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They all did it. That’s the bloody point.
Trump is not the problem. Trump is just the latest manifestation.
The problem is the empire.
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Obama & Hillary didn’t have concentration camps. Sorry to burst your bubble.
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Of course it is, there are no heroes in politics. That said, this shit is so much worse than it likely would have been under Clinton.
You’re right; there would have still been abuse of power, and unethical behavior - but not this flagrantly and not to this magnitude. When it comes to immigration, the Clintons were bad, and Obama wasn’t better.
But 45 is the worst of all possible options, because he normalizes the powers that be not even giving enough of a fuck to pretend anymore, and now we have concentration camps for kids.
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These are Obama’s camps:
These are Obama’s imprisoned children:
The major change under Trump is the automatic separation of children.
It wasn’t that Obama didn’t do that, it’s just that it wasn’t automatic until now. And the kids were still locked up in camps, they just weren’t always separated from their parents while it happened.
Most of the rest of it predates Trump.
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I always think of the difference between Democrats and Republicans as the difference between lightly trailing the brakes and flooring it respectively.
With the dems you at least get the occasional nod to human rights, what health care should be like, a more diplomatic face on our acts of military aggression across the world.
But no doubt, their party has been hollowed out by the same corporate cash as the republicans.
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Within 20 days the children are temporarily placed with a foster family until they and their guardians cases go before judges. Usually this ends up being close relatives within the USA. They are eventually reunited when either granted admission or deported.
Doesn’t excuse the policy. When you’re talking especially about young children, these sorts of things can cause lasting psychological harm. There are better ways to deal with immigration that doesn’t involve treating children like dangerous criminals.
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Or like chattel slaves.
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Nazis separated me from my parents as a child. The trauma lasts a lifetime
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I’m going to describe my current understanding of the differences between the new Trump child separation policy and the previous (and still continuing) use of the same kind of facility to house immigrant minors.
Previously a child who showed up with a responsible adult would, some how or other, almost always stay with that adult. There have been, for some time now, quite a few minors showing up at the border without a presumptive legal guardian, and the US was housing them in rather hastily built facilities (including sometimes some with tents). The policy was to find a legal guardian for these minors and get them housed in the community as quickly as possible, very often they were traveling toward family in the US, and would end up there, but sometimes it meant foster-care. This meant they typically spent less than two months in the facility and the clear aim of the whole process was to re-unite them with family. We avoided using this reuniting as an opportunity to deport the family while the process ran. The fact that they showed up unaccompanied means that the minors housed would usually be of an age to be capable of a trip to the US unaccompanied. Essentially no toddlers. Probably very few pre-schoolers. Could well have been some elementary-age kids. Heavily skewed toward the high end, however. Fundamentally this policy is a solution to a problem. We have minors showing up at the border without guardians, how can we get them to proper guardians?
The new policy is to take minors from their guardians when they show up in the hopes that this torment will prevent future immigration and/or will be popular with the Republican base. This means children are taken from their parents by the US government, even very young children. The aim of the policy is not to send them along to the best available guardian, it is to psychologically torture their family. There is no clear outcome for the child, certainly not one friendly to them. The government in general is using every opportunity to find and seize immigrants, so surely it has become much harder to place minors with family, this goes for both unaccompanied minors and those the government takes from parents. The children being taken from adults are now not judged, or by circumstance other than our governments policy forced, to cross the border alone. They are younger, weaker. It seems they are still being sent out to foster care, but now that isn’t the best solution we could come up with, it is just coasting on previous processes after we have taken the child from their familiar guardian. The number of children detained has risen very rapidly, suggesting that the previous placement processes may be unable to keep up with the additional load and the situation could rapidly worsen as children languish in camps. Younger children, explicitly and intentionally abused by the US government in order to torment their parents, held longer, in facilities that are more crowded and of lower quality (automatic consequence of needing to grow capacity), with the torment and cruelty as the explicit objective of the policy.
But, both sides, right? Right?
In the previous policy we pretty much have “we should have better facilities for this, or faster processes, or do better on helping the countries that are sending youngsters our way or something!”.
In the current policy we have “could you possibly stop kidnapping and tormenting small children?”.
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That’s bad enough in itself, but what sort of inhumane fuck separates kids young enough to still need diapers (and for me that indicates ‘could still be breastfeeding’) from their mothers and trusts that other inmates will take care of the diapers. Even US single mums who go to prison, presumably get their babies put into some sort of proper fostercare (or do they? The US is so fucked up these days… but it’s what I would expect to happen here in UK with imprisoned mothers of babies/toddlers).
(And if a toddler gets granted political asylum and grows up with medical conditions future medical science puts down to lack of breast milk (I will not be surprised to see such an outcome in medical science at some point) will they be suing the US govt in 20 years’ time?)
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Since we’re dealing with apologists for Il Douche’s immigration policy, it’s important to clarify that this isn’t one of them:
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tRump and his toadies.
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No “could be” about it; there’s at least one account thereof:
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This whole thing is so fucking monstrous, and that this administration is so bald-faced in their lying that they’re pretending like it isn’t 100% their own policy is amazing. (What’s more amazing is that anyone believes them.)
While this administration pretends that a) it’s not their policy (it’s just a coincidence it’s happening to everyone, I guess), b) they’re doing this, but only because it’s a law created by the Democrats (which weirdly only now took effect, somehow), c) they’re doing this because the Democrats “forced them” (stop hitting yourself), a bunch of kids are being seriously traumatized for life (assuming something worse doesn’t happen to them). Everyone involved in this should be jailed. The fucking ICE agents who are so sad to be traumatizing children but are doing it anyways should be in prison. “Just following orders” isn’t an excuse; we know that. They should count themselves lucky, too - I’d feel like any parent who had their children taken from them in circumstances like this would be justified in beating the offending ICE agents to death.
It turns out that 27% of the country are hard-core, unapologetic fascists. I’m not sure if I’m shocked it’s so high or surprised it’s so low.
Weirdly, the comic book supervillains end up being smarter and more nuanced than Trump administration people. I mean, seriously - even Lex Luthor divested himself of his business before running for president, for example. The idea that he wouldn’t do that was too outlandish even for comic book writers. Like much else happening in this administration.
In theory, they’re all supposed to be deported together, but the problem is that there’s so much chaos no one knows what’s going on and there are already cases where the adults have been sent back and the kids are still in the system, with no mechanism for the parents to get them back. (Also they’re being incredibly sloppy keeping track of the kids and knowing who their parents are. We’re going to see a lot more cases like this, and kids simply getting lost in the system.)
None of them had defensible policies. Automatically separating children from their parents IS a pretty big fucking leap beyond what anyone else was doing, though.
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The more important difference is that the Trump administration is prosecuting everyone who enters the country illegally. Previously prosecution was done much more selectively and legal guardians were released with children pending a hearing but 80% or so never showed up for the hearing. The decision to prosecute the guardians who enter illegally and to hold them pending judicial proceedings is what causes the separation.
I know its nice to be able to point fingers at someone when stuff like this happens, but it’s really not quite that simple, is it… stuff like this didn’t just suddenly come out of nowhere. It’s not like the sun was farting rainbows and then everything changed when the Trump nation attacked.
If anything, Trump did the nation a huge favor by finally shattering that sparkling white facade and showing people how much ugliness there really is underneath.
I think when all of this is over people ought to take a real hard look at what kind of nation the US has become, and I don’t think just going back to the same old bickering and finger pointing between parties is gonna change things.
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Newsflash;
Only people with unacknowledged privilege have ever sincerely believed in that facade; meanwhile people of color, gay folks and every other persecuted ‘minority’ in the country already knew the ugly reality, all too well.
That 45’s blatant fuckery had the additional result of ripping the blindfold off the eyes of some of the more privileged populace is no favor whatsoever to us; as the situation goes from bad to even worse… especially if all the outrage and horror just gets normalized and papered over as “that’s just the way it is now.”
Nice automatic assumption that we’re all going to make it out of this mess in one piece with no irreparable damage.
*edited for clarification
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Yup.
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