Mayberry: Child abuse on border is Trump’s latest low
Donald Trump is torturing toddlers.
That little girl in the red shirt. She’s 2.
He is operating three “tender age” facilities or “baby jails” housing hundreds of small children, as well as abandoned Walmarts and tent cities and other facilities for older children all over the country.
He has taken nursing infants away from their mothers to strongarm Congress into giving him $25 billion of our tax money for a wall virtually no one wants.
Because. He promised. His base.
That is exactly what is going on here.
It could not be clearer than if he cut letters out of magazines to paste up into a ransom note.
When I say he is torturing little kids, I don’t mean he’s pulling out tiny fingernails, but he is causing such psychological and emotional trauma, “mental shrapnel,” as one psychologist called it, to them that they may never get over it for the rest of their lives.
He started his presidential campaign on a vile racist note by denouncing Mexicans as rapists and murderers, fomenting enough irrational fear and hatred to carry him into the White House.
He then made an empty “sound-bite” promise to his supporters that he would build a wall along all the 1,933 miles of our border with Mexico – and make Mexico pay for it.
Surely there wasn’t a single person at any Trump rally who was ignorant and stupid enough to believe that. Surely not?
The House was scheduled to vote on two competing immigration bills last night that would sharply curtail legal immigration, give some relief to the Dreamers and give him the whole $25 billion.
Maybe one of those bills passed the House after this writing but neither is likely to pass the Senate, which in any case cannot trust Trump to sign anything Congress puts in front of him.
Like generals who are always fighting the last war, Trump has revved up his followers to fight the economic immigration of single men, which has been on the decline for years, instead of dealing with the growing humanitarian crisis in our neighboring countries – Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico — that is driving whole families here.
“It’s human nature to run out of a burning building,” former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said on TV Wednesday night, referring to mothers and fathers trying to rescue their children from the pervasive crime and violence, including horrendous gang and domestic violence, in those countries.
And when those people turn up on our doorstep, we have a moral obligation and a legal obligation under international law and under our own well-established laws to give them “due process” – the opportunity to plead for asylum for fear of their lives.
Just building a wall to keep them out, or blocking the ports of entry and stranding them on the other side at the mercy of the murderous cartels, will not make us any more secure.
The children we have detained will carry the grave psychological wounds and seeds of hatred we have instilled in them to new homes here or back to their own countries to be nurtured into radical violence against us, just as happened in the Middle East.
Trump’s zero-tolerance policy (and it was his policy, announced April 6) has backfired badly on him and is going to keep backfiring regardless of the executive order he signed Wednesday.
As Nancy Pelosi observed, that order does nothing more than replace the separation and detention of children with the incarceration of entire families in prison-like conditions.
No doubt Trump will posture and preen, claiming that he is the savior of these children from a non-existent law he claims Democrats forced on him.
No doubt some small fraction of the American public will believe him.
In the meantime, those terrified children are making us cry and making our stomachs turn (and making us raise millions of dollars to help them) as we wonder, how did America come to this?
How did we, who saved so many millions of Irish, Poles, Jews, Cubans and others from the potato famine and European wars and starvation and totalitarianism become so fearful and hard-hearted after those immigrants went on to make this country even greater?
Once again, we must look to our courts to save us – as they have on the Muslim ban, transgenders in the military, the Dreamers program, reproductive rights and so many other rights Trump has tried to take away in the last year and a half.
Fortunately, there is help already in place, in the form of a 1997 settlement agreement of a 1985 lawsuit, Flores v. Sessions, that still closely monitors the care and treatment of unaccompanied minor immigrants.
New suits are being filed every day.
The ACLU brought a suit in February in San Diego on behalf of Ms. L, a Congolese woman who sought asylum in the U.S. at the San Diego port of entry and was separated from her 7-yearold daughter for four months.
Judge Dana M. Sabraw, a George Bush appointee, on June 6 refused to dismiss the suit and will soon be ruling on whether to make it a nationwide class action on behalf of all parents separated from their children at the border.
If those parents prevail, the federal government may end up owing them millions of dollars in damages.
“These allegations sufficiently describe government conduct that arbitrarily tears at the sacred bond between parent and child,” the judge said.
“Such conduct … is brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency,” he wrote. “Brutal.” U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, the great civil rights icon, brought it all home at a House committee hearing on Hillary Clinton’s emails (yet again) Tuesday.
“We should be able to agree that we will not keep children in internment camps indefinitely and hidden away from public view.
“What country is that?” he asked indignantly. “This is the United States of America!”
Jodine Mayberry is a retired editor, longtime journalist and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@comcast.net.