By Shera Phillips
Children are being ripped away from their parents and forcibly taken to concentration camps. It is estimated 10,000 children are now imprisoned. Trump has said “Immigrants aren’t people. They are animals”. He, his counterparts and their policies blatantly demonstrate their lack of respect for human life. This is how slaveowners justified the genocide against enslaved people in the U.S.
A tidal wave of protests has swept the country against this policy. So Trump issued an executive order that seemed to stop this. That’s a deception. The order calls for building prisons for 20,000 families on military bases; the indefinite imprisonment of families, and no date or plan for family reunification. On June 19 Trump went to court to ask that the current law banning children from being incarcerated more than 20 days be lifted for immigrants and that these prisons be exempted from current minimal standards for child incarceration, minimal stands that include education and recreation time. ICE admits not knowing where 1,500 children are.
The “Justice” department has repeatedly denied public access to see the conditions which already exist in these for-profit prisons. U.S. Congress member Jeff Merkley’s multiple attempts to enter the Bronxville, Tx “detention center”, a repurposed Walmart with blackened windows, have repeatedly been denied and he was forced off the property.
Children, one of the most defenseless groups, can barely stand being away from their parents while they use the restroom, yet they are being kidnapped, held in cages and sleeping on concrete floors. We can only imagine what other traumatizing events they are enduring. The Huffington Post reports that these children are being given psychiatric drugs.
The fact that we’ve allowed our government to commit atrocities that are reminiscent of previous egregious acts against humanity is shameful and unfathomable. We should be outraged! There should be demonstrations happening all over this country demanding these children be returned to their parents immediately. Many of the immigrants in our country find themselves in circumstances that render them all but paralyzed and we need to stand with and for them.
As the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would say, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. This monstrosity of justice is taking place every day on our very own soil as we sit idly by consumed with the latest in pop culture. We are a mesmerized, hypnotized audience watching our government perform a magic show of illusions and disappearing acts that we are funding.