They’ve been much on our minds, this week, the children. Children detained together in cages, frightened. I’ve heard the same party line that you have, from officials who have not visited the detention centers: that the children are well cared for, that it is the law to separate the children from their parents, that they and their parents are infesting our nation, that their parents were sent here because they are criminals. I’ve seen what you’ve seen: desperate women and men forced to hand their sobbing children over to an uncertain fate.
An Act of Desperation
What is it about the children and their parents that some Americans hate so much: their color? their poverty? their language? their desperation? Check, check, check. Whatever we are told about them—their many crimes, their gang affiliations—one thing is certain: they are desperate, and some Americans don’t care. They’d have to be desperate to pay the unscrupulous coyotes to guide them on a perilous journey with their children; a journey with an uncertain and dangerous end. The end is indeed dangerous for the children and for their parents: they may never be reunited.
Reunion?
The question of reunion never seemed to enter the official mind. The parents detained or turned back don’t have the same ID as the children. The children are being sent all over the country. The parents are poor people with no clout and little English: how will they find their children? Who will help them?
Officials now are arguing about the creation of tent camps to house entire families gathered up at the border. The outcry about the ripping of the children away from their parents has created an official solution: incarcerate everyone. “There,” they seem to say to the people of this country, “happy now? The children will stay with their parents, so shut up.” No, not happy. What happens to the families in the tents? Do they stay there forever? Are they interned until the parents are old and the children have their own children? What is the government doing in our names?
History disagrees
There’s been much talk about how we are no longer the nation we thought we were. Thinking about our history, I would have to disagree. Sadly, and in the 21st century, we are showing ourselves to be the nation we’ve always been. There are not too many people of Native American, African American or Latino American ancestry in the president’s base, just because of the attempts at extinction and the injustices they’ve suffered at the nation’s hands, at the hands of those in power who hate them.
Jewish and Italian immigrants were ghettoized once they reached Miss Liberty’s arms, and the Irish escaping famine were mistreated in 19th century America. Japanese Americans were put into internment camps during World War II, their homes and businesses confiscated and never returned. The U.S. government turned away ships of escaping Jews on the cusp of the war, and never participated in the British program of offering asylum to the children after their parents were taken to concentration camps in Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech lands.
Shameful
Over three centuries, the ones who immigrated to these shores from Europe hated the others, saw them as other, brought their slaves, and grabbed the power, the land, and liberty of others’. To modern eyes, that shameful history worked its way into our consciousness as wrong in the middle of the 19th century and seemed on firmer ground in the 21st century. Our nation has regressed over the years just as much as it has progressed, but our hatred of people of color, of poverty, of otherness has erupted again. Was that animus stewing in the DNA of Americans who approve of these detention camps? Do they see desperate people fleeing to our border as an infestation? Was I wrong to hope that this hatred was gone for good?
Helping the children
The president did not win the popular vote, but he did win the election because of the eruption of hatred and despite the many Americans of good will. The people of good will have few routes to helping the children now: voting, protesting, disobeying, and demanding that those who represent us and are silent find the backbone and represent the best in us, not the worst. We all must engage, vigorously, and succeed quickly.
June 28th Women’s March, Washington, DC https://www.endfamilyseparation.us/?link_id=2&can_id=32098368e2b0501c35d5c691d3bba815&source=email-its-getting-worse&email_referrer=email_374543___subject_463881&email_subject=theyre-planning-more-child-prisons
League of Women Voters to help register voters, modernize voting, push back on voter restrictions: https://www.lwv.org/