Post by Bob on Jun 12, 2018 13:55:37 GMT -5
A powerful op-ed by Michelle Goldberg (NY Times). It is beyond sad to think that this is what our country is becoming. There are parallels to other authoritarian regimes, and I think we're heading in that direction. These are dangerous times, folks.
First They Came for the Migrants
The sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In America in 2018, the same could be said of authoritarianism.
Since Donald Trump was elected, there’s been a boom in best-selling books about the fragility of liberal democracy, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” Many have noted that the president’s rhetoric abounds in classic fascist tropes, including the demonization of minorities and attempts to paint the press as treasonous. Trump is obviously more comfortable with despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin than democrats like Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
We still talk about American fascism as a looming threat, something that could happen if we’re not vigilant. But for undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.
There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he’d gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers. On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decreed that most people fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer be eligible for asylum.
Keilyn Enamorada Matute, from Honduras, sitting with her four-year old son, as they surrender themselves to Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States on June 8.CreditLynsey Addario for The New York Times
But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims. “This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”
Family separations began last year — immigrant advocates aren’t sure exactly when — and have ramped up with the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border without authorization. Over two weeks in May, more than 650 children were snatched from their parents.
The human consequences have been horrific. Last week, The New York Times described a 5-year-old boy from Honduras who had been separated from his father and cried himself to sleep at night with a stick-figure drawing of his family under his pillow. The Washington Post reported that Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old who is also from Honduras, killed himself in a padded cell after his 3-year-old was wrenched from his arms.
We will never know what torments besieged Muñoz when he took his own life. But Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington State, recently met with migrant women being held in a federal prison, many of whom, she said, were forcibly separated from children as young as 1. Some had their kids physically torn from them. Others were told that they had to go have their photograph taken; when they returned, their children were gone.
In some cases, Jayapal said, the women could hear their kids screaming in the next room. “Many of them were told by Border Patrol that they would never see their children again,” she told me.
America’s immigration system was capricious and cruel before Trump. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently visited an immigrant processing center in McAllen, Tex. Describing how men, women, boys and girls were separated and kept in chain-linked enclosures, he emphasized that the site wasn’t new: “It’s essentially the same construction that was there during Obama,” he said. The difference is that, until recently, the kids’ section held older children who had crossed the border on their own. Now, he told me, the youngest was 4 or 5.
These kids are being used as pawns to persuade parents to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to America. The administration, Merkley told me, has “decided that treating kids in this fashion would influence the adults not to seek asylum. They would hurt children to influence the parents.”
There are still mechanisms in American government that can stop this evil. Last Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, proposed a bill that would keep most families detained at the border together. The A.C.L.U. has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents whose children were taken from them and is asking a federal court for a nationwide injunction to stop family separations.
But for now, what is happening is the sort of moral enormity that once seemed unthinkable in contemporary America, the kind captured in the Martin Niemöller poem that’s repeated so often it’s become a cliché: “First they came …” There is no reason to believe that undocumented immigrants will be the last group of people deemed beyond the law’s protection.
Senator Merkley told me he asked people working in the detention center if they were concerned about the impact that family separation would have on the children who had been put under their authority. The answer, he said, was, “We simply follow the orders from above.”
(A few of the reader replies)
"We simply follow orders from above." Chilling. Thank you for this necessary piece. As decent human beings, we need to make as much noise about this as possible. That anyone would justify this inhumane (and illegal) treatment of children and vulnerable parent migrants shows what a dark place our country is in these days.
___________________________________
This needs to be seen as a piece and a pattern of what is being sanctioned by this administration. First we had the Muslim ban which is still in operation in some form, Then we had Puerto Rico which was not treated the same way as other America locations in a natural disaster and is still in disarray. Now we have the unconscionable situation of small children and families being separated for no good reason but spite and cruelty. Add to that the vulgar way Canada has just been referred to and how our allies have been treated and honestly I think we are losing our soul. Unless our leaders start to stand up for American values I'm not too hopeful. We are a nation of people in anxiety right now.
___________________________________
I agree that families should not be separated when all of them try to cross the border illegally. The entire family needs to be sent back.
The pizza delivery man has nobody but himself to blame, having ignored a deportation order 8 years ago. He has no respect for our laws. Why didn't the wife take any kind of action to make him legal in the past 8 years?
Our immigration system is not broken. It's just that our laws are not enforced - until now.
My grandfather came legally in 1923 after trying in 1921 and told that he can't enter the country. he didn't violate the law. he patiently waited until he was called. He had no money, but he had honor and respect for the USA.
My wife came here on a work visa in 1989 legally and became a naturalized citizen 3 years ago. I am so proud of her. She has a unique viewpoint, having gone through the entire immigration process.
She says the pizza guy disrespected our nation's laws while she respected them and did everything by the book. In addition, he ignored a deportation order.
She says his actions are a slap in the face to every legal immigrant who honestly went through our immigration process.
Now he wants a break? No way. He should have thought of that before putting his family in jeopardy.
Enforce our laws. Enough is enough.
Reply80 Recommend
First They Came for the Migrants
The sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In America in 2018, the same could be said of authoritarianism.
Since Donald Trump was elected, there’s been a boom in best-selling books about the fragility of liberal democracy, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” Many have noted that the president’s rhetoric abounds in classic fascist tropes, including the demonization of minorities and attempts to paint the press as treasonous. Trump is obviously more comfortable with despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin than democrats like Canada’s Justin Trudeau.
We still talk about American fascism as a looming threat, something that could happen if we’re not vigilant. But for undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.
There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he’d gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers. On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decreed that most people fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer be eligible for asylum.
Keilyn Enamorada Matute, from Honduras, sitting with her four-year old son, as they surrender themselves to Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico to the United States on June 8.CreditLynsey Addario for The New York Times
But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims. “This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”
Family separations began last year — immigrant advocates aren’t sure exactly when — and have ramped up with the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border without authorization. Over two weeks in May, more than 650 children were snatched from their parents.
The human consequences have been horrific. Last week, The New York Times described a 5-year-old boy from Honduras who had been separated from his father and cried himself to sleep at night with a stick-figure drawing of his family under his pillow. The Washington Post reported that Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old who is also from Honduras, killed himself in a padded cell after his 3-year-old was wrenched from his arms.
We will never know what torments besieged Muñoz when he took his own life. But Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington State, recently met with migrant women being held in a federal prison, many of whom, she said, were forcibly separated from children as young as 1. Some had their kids physically torn from them. Others were told that they had to go have their photograph taken; when they returned, their children were gone.
In some cases, Jayapal said, the women could hear their kids screaming in the next room. “Many of them were told by Border Patrol that they would never see their children again,” she told me.
America’s immigration system was capricious and cruel before Trump. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently visited an immigrant processing center in McAllen, Tex. Describing how men, women, boys and girls were separated and kept in chain-linked enclosures, he emphasized that the site wasn’t new: “It’s essentially the same construction that was there during Obama,” he said. The difference is that, until recently, the kids’ section held older children who had crossed the border on their own. Now, he told me, the youngest was 4 or 5.
These kids are being used as pawns to persuade parents to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to America. The administration, Merkley told me, has “decided that treating kids in this fashion would influence the adults not to seek asylum. They would hurt children to influence the parents.”
There are still mechanisms in American government that can stop this evil. Last Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, proposed a bill that would keep most families detained at the border together. The A.C.L.U. has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents whose children were taken from them and is asking a federal court for a nationwide injunction to stop family separations.
But for now, what is happening is the sort of moral enormity that once seemed unthinkable in contemporary America, the kind captured in the Martin Niemöller poem that’s repeated so often it’s become a cliché: “First they came …” There is no reason to believe that undocumented immigrants will be the last group of people deemed beyond the law’s protection.
Senator Merkley told me he asked people working in the detention center if they were concerned about the impact that family separation would have on the children who had been put under their authority. The answer, he said, was, “We simply follow the orders from above.”
(A few of the reader replies)
"We simply follow orders from above." Chilling. Thank you for this necessary piece. As decent human beings, we need to make as much noise about this as possible. That anyone would justify this inhumane (and illegal) treatment of children and vulnerable parent migrants shows what a dark place our country is in these days.
___________________________________
This needs to be seen as a piece and a pattern of what is being sanctioned by this administration. First we had the Muslim ban which is still in operation in some form, Then we had Puerto Rico which was not treated the same way as other America locations in a natural disaster and is still in disarray. Now we have the unconscionable situation of small children and families being separated for no good reason but spite and cruelty. Add to that the vulgar way Canada has just been referred to and how our allies have been treated and honestly I think we are losing our soul. Unless our leaders start to stand up for American values I'm not too hopeful. We are a nation of people in anxiety right now.
___________________________________
I agree that families should not be separated when all of them try to cross the border illegally. The entire family needs to be sent back.
The pizza delivery man has nobody but himself to blame, having ignored a deportation order 8 years ago. He has no respect for our laws. Why didn't the wife take any kind of action to make him legal in the past 8 years?
Our immigration system is not broken. It's just that our laws are not enforced - until now.
My grandfather came legally in 1923 after trying in 1921 and told that he can't enter the country. he didn't violate the law. he patiently waited until he was called. He had no money, but he had honor and respect for the USA.
My wife came here on a work visa in 1989 legally and became a naturalized citizen 3 years ago. I am so proud of her. She has a unique viewpoint, having gone through the entire immigration process.
She says the pizza guy disrespected our nation's laws while she respected them and did everything by the book. In addition, he ignored a deportation order.
She says his actions are a slap in the face to every legal immigrant who honestly went through our immigration process.
Now he wants a break? No way. He should have thought of that before putting his family in jeopardy.
Enforce our laws. Enough is enough.
Reply80 Recommend