Taxpayers pay $775 per child per night to detain separated migrant kids in those 'concentration camps'

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/24/taxpayers-pay-775-per-child-p.html

Cruelly detaining kids in Border Patrol camps will cost taxpayers more than it would to put the families up together in high-end hotels.

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The voter base of “the party of fiscal responsibility” has none-the-less shown itself more than willing to pay a premium for performative cruelty targeted at darker skinned people.

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I will remember to pretend to be shocked when we discover that the companies running those camps have close ties with the administration.

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What are you talking about? $775 is true value for money. $250 at a proper detention facility buys almost no performative cruelty, while actually putting them up in a hotel would be rewarding these illegal immigrant criminal refugee rapists (and, I assume, some good people).

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I will never understand how any human can use kids for profit.

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Don’t think of them as people, think of them as “illegals”.

It’s the foundation of the prison system.

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Slightly off-topic, but I’m looking forward to the reaction to the new BBC/HBO series “Years and Years”, especially episode 5.

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Goddamn, it would be cheaper to put them up at Mar-a-Lago!

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Interesting that the cost per night is strangely similar to a nights stay at a trump hotel.

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The companies running those places are tracking those kids in great detail so that they can bill the government for them. (I wonder: do they chip them like pets, or just an old style number tattoo?)

And yet, somehow they can’t manage to reunite the kids separated from their parents.

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It’s part and parcel with the whole American Christian Dominionist mindset. What better way to subjugate people than strip them from their parents at birth. In particular, this works for those with a particular racist bend to this ideology. I’m just waiting for Betsy DeVos to talk crap about “Curse of Ham” or some crap.

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You assume, here, that the bill bears any logical and consistent relationship to the services being provided.

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Obviously, it was never about border safety, criminal immigrants, or even racism.
It’s just a way to funnel taxpayer money to the party’s favorite business leaders. This in not even kept secret. The only people fooling themselves into thinking this is all for public safety are the uneducated, misinformed base. Yes, the deplorables.

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How much more with soap and toothbrushes?

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While it might have no relationship to the final bill, I’m certain that they have an asset tracking system.

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I would love to see a breakdown of where every dime of that $775 ends up…

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This right here is why I keep going back to the original definition of fascism to describe modern American public policy: the merger of state and corporate interests. Trump and his supporters want to punish immigrants and American corporations have already made an art form out of punishing people with impunity. It’s a perfect arrangement for both of them, so of course it’s as inevitable as the tides. Just like every highly-profitable state-sponsored dehumanization that came before them, going all the way back before IBM helped the Nazis catalog Jewish people whose livelihoods and lives were stolen in the name of Aryanization. It’s looking more and more like an integral part of western DNA. We have a largely unfettered capitalist system, legally divorced from any social conscientiousness or liability, just waiting to court (or be courted by) the next state actor with bad intentions. It’s a recipe for ever-more-frequent disasters until disaster becomes the status quo. Shit, we’re pretty much already there.

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Why the ‘scare quotes’?

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The performative cruelty is for the base. The graft is for the corporate donors. Its GOP perfection.

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Those concentration camps are expensive. Even if you take away rosaries from little children and sell them they’re still running at a deficit. There must be some way to make up the difference once those little rapists and drug dealers with calves the size of cantaloupes die. Soap, or maybe lampshades?

Yeah, I said it. We are the Nazis this time around. This needs to end with Crimes Against Humanity trials at the Hague.

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