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LINK Only now do we understand the true cruelty of Trump’s family separation - The Washington Post

Only now do we understand the true cruelty of Trump’s family separation

BEFORE THE spring of 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had no system in place to track migrant children who were separated from their families. That was the case even though, it now turns out, the Trump administration, in its first months in office, had already begun wrenching scores of babies, toddlers, tweens and adolescents from their parents to deter illegal border crossings. Then, beginning in April last year, the administration doubled down, systematically breaking apart migrant families upon apprehension at the border — still with no means of tracking and reuniting the families it had sundered.

Only now, 16 months after a federal judge ordered migrant families reunified, has the scale of the administration’s cruelty become understood. Most Americans thought the policy detestable. It was far worse than they imagined.

Having resisted demands that it compile a definitive listing of the families broken apart by its policies, the administration finally relented this spring when U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw ordered a full accounting. Last week, hours before the deadline set by the judge, the government submitted the numbers to the American Civil Liberties Union, to whose volunteers it has fallen to clean up the mess created by President Trump, former attorney general Jeff Sessions, former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and others.

No, it was not only the 2,814 traumatized children who had been separated and were in custody under the government’s policy of “zero tolerance” for unauthorized border crossers when Judge Sabraw ordered families reunified in June last year. It turns out that an additional 1,556 children had been separated in the preceding 12-month period, beginning in July 2017. Of those, more than 300 were 5 years old or younger.

Imagine, if you can, the suffering visited upon those children, including many still in diapers and requiring afternoon naps, by the administration’s cavalier brutality and incompetence — the anguish of little girls and boys removed from their parents for weeks or months because of a president lacking a conscience and a government whose data systems were not suited to the task of reunification. Those wounds won’t heal easily, or ever.

Incredibly, having shattered so many families, the administration threw up its hands and declared the task of reuniting them beyond its capabilities. Even now, volunteers working under the coordination of the ACLU are going door to door in Guatemala and Honduras, seeking to ascertain whether families have recovered their children.

More than 1,000 additional migrant children have been separated in the past 17 months on the grounds, the government says, that their parents or guardians endangered or abused them, or were unable to care for them, or were criminals, or were not actually their parents. The ACLU maintains that in some cases, those separations are also unjustified, triggered by minor offenses committed by the parents, such as shoplifting or driving without a valid license. It has asked Judge Sabraw to set a narrow standard for separations.

In all, the administration has taken at least 5,460 children from their parents. That is a stain on Mr. Trump, on the government he leads and on America.

HippieChick58 9 Nov 2
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13 comments

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3

Shame, shame, shame and utter ENDLESS SHAME upon America for this, yet another, BLATANT Breach of Human Rights, WHY, in the name of ALL FUCK isn't the International Courts of Human Rights stepping in and exerting it's 'supposed' Laws and Powers on this?
Is it because,

  1. and in my opinion here, they are AFRAID of America and American Repercussions?, OR,
  2. my opinion also, that these children and families ARE not as important on the World Scene as were the Jews ( and apologies to the Jews btw) post the Holocaust, OR,
  3. my opinion here also, the International Courts just don't give a Flying Fuck about this shameful action anymore?
    Where is the United Nations stance on this kind of atrocity?
    Where is their response and action?
    Are they doing Sweet Fuck All simply because their comfy H.Q. IS IN America and they too are scared of America?
    Wake up you Toothless Tigers of the Useless Nobodies ( United Nations), stop your snoring and purring in your comfortable chairs and offices, get OFF your fat, shiny arses for a change AND start doing the jobs you WERE set uo to do for once.
    the Unmitigated System of Abductions, aka the U.S.of A., IS flaunting YOUR Laws and Edicts, IT IS a Cosignatory Nation to the International Bill of Human Rights in case you've forgotten that FACT, and as such MUST,by International Laws, ABIDE by the the Bill of Human Rights OR suffer the punishments set forth for breaching them.
1

How hard is it to give every detainee a piece of paper with several empty boxes labeled "Dependants name, relation, age, assigned number" Regardless of how you feel about the imigrant situation and moral issues aside, a bureaucratic failure like that is just embarrassing. When you consider the problem reuniting families could have been solved with about 20 minutes with a word processing software and a few emails, there is little excuse.

2

It is a stain on Mr. Trump. The problem is that it is very hard to stain excrement.

The stain of excrement ( shit to be very blunt here) not only encloses the Humpty tRumpty Muppet Administration BUT, in my opinion, EVERY person in America who voted him and them in, supports them AND those who sat back and PERMITTED this atrocity to happen and continue.

@Triphid Correct. And we can do nothing about his moronic “loyal” voters, but we cannot afford to let people sit back the next time. Let’s volunteer for the Dems to get out the vote. Not for the Dems if you don’t particularly like them (I happen to be one), but for the country.

@Rodatheist I have always believed that combining words such "can" and "do" with the word " nothing" are very little more than a cop-out, usually meaning, in my opinion, something like " I'm alright Jack, so why bother rocking the boat," or something similar.
I was merely 16 years of age and was amongst some 30- 40 + teenaged students CRAMMED into classes at school in classrooms meant only to hold a maximum of 20 students each, in a town with a population exceeding 36,000 people and a State Government repeatedly stating " We see NO need for Broken Hill to have a second, Public Secondary School " and a School Principal that ' sucked up to the arses of the Government' agreeing with them as well.
With the assistance of 3 Teachers, .my father's typewriter and the 'sensitive' information provided by those 3 Teachers, I began a campaign, both through our local press and press from around the whole country to EXPOSE the terrible conditions we were FORCED to endure and study under.
After hearing fellow students and Teachers saying day after day, week after week, " Why bother WE can DO NOTHING," eventually it turned into " WE CAN do NOTHING but PROTEST and have our protests heard and force them to be acted upon."
We held snap Student Strikes, Sit-ins, Street Marches usually consisting of well over 600+ students at a time, the police would come along and, even though WE thought that they were there to arrest us, they ACTUALLY HALTED the traffic for us, and even picked up the lead Matchers as they tired and gave them a ride back to the rear of the march as well as providing everyone with cool, fresh water to drink.
YES, WE won the battle and the War, YES, the Government yielded and now we have 2 Public Secondary Schools finally.
And the moral of the story, There is NO such thing as 'can do nothing,' ' CAN DO' is ALL that truly applies WHEN people put THEIR minds to it AND are determined to MAKE it HAPPEN.

@Triphid Well, I stand by what I said because what I said is that we can do nothing about the deplorables that support the Trump Show. Are you saying that we can? Well, I would love to see the plan.
And then I said that we cannot afford to continue sitting elections out and let those deplorables continue in power.
I don’t see anything wrong with my use of can and cannot.

@Rodatheist Well I am at loss that someone of, possibly, your age and life experiences can be so down-right negative in my opinion.

3

These are American crimes against humanity, against children and for profit. The name of America will forever be shit-smeared throughout history. Humpty Dump may be the President but there are 40 million Americans who are just like him and who support him. No impeachment, no election, no change of government will address the trauma that these children will experience for the rest of their lives. America has become a place of shame and cruelty. Like Nazi Germany America and Americans will be forever known as place where crimes against humanity were committed so that a small group of rich people could become richer without having to answer for their vile acts of depravity.

7

Just a continuous flow of this administration's inhumanity..I want them All brought up on Crimes Against Humanity..

Sadly Charlene, easier, much easier, said than done.

@Rodatheist Why is that, it was a very simple thing to bring the Top Nazis to the Nuremberg Trails wasn't it?
What's so different about hauling Humpty tRumpty &Co. over the same coals?
Just because he is Potus 45 does NOT mean that he is AUTOMATICALLY above and beyond the Law, in ALL reality HE is just another person elected into a position from which he SERVES the People is he not?

@Triphid the charges Need to brought by an 2nd another country..like Honduras

@Charlene Why MUST another country bring forth the Charges?
Is NOT America a 'supposed' DEMOCRACY and as such, the PEOPLE can bring these charges to bear themselves and DEMAND that these charges be heard in the International Courts of Justice?
Where IS the Intestinal Fortitude of America?
OR, IS America ONLY interested in 'fiddling' with everyone else's countries and lives, etc, and far too chicken livered to admit that it has been wrong and to do something POSITIVE about it?

@Triphid The difference is that the judges in the Nuremberg trials were not Nazis. In our case, the senate is dominated by Republicans, a situation which we were unable to correct during the 2018 mid term elections. So, POTUS himself is GUILTY as hell, however, his power is not in him, but comes from the support of 30 to 40 million of deplorables that will be wiggling their fingers in our mouths for as long as we let them.

@Rodatheist Then, if that be the case, one could NOT be deemed to be wrong by saying,
A) the American Constitution, like so many other Westernised Countries, has PLACED their Political Leaders AND Politicians ABOVE the Laws of Land that govern everyone else,
B) the system, therefore, is so decadent and corrupted that even maggots would be loath to feed upon it, and,
C) IT IS HIGH time for the entire system to torn down and changed in favour of a TRULY DEMOCRATIC system then.

@Triphid A) The founding fathers put into the American Constitution a procedure for removal of the individual serving as the President of the Union. The method they chose was to have the House of Representatives serve as an investigative body, akin to the District Attorney, which, once having found motives for the removal of the person serving as the President, due to the violation of the law, writes articles of impeachment that are sent to the Senate. Then the Senate is constituted as a court of law presided by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and with all the Senators serving as jurors. This was the founding fathers way to make sure the president would not be above the law. But the founding fathers could not predict that a law breaking tyrant would be supported my a majority of members of the Senate that stop caring about the Union and all they want is to be able to impose their backward ideas on everyone else. The US Constitution does not place anyone above the law. It is a reckless minority of deplorables that, with the complacency of the rest of the population, have come to dominate the Senate and are allowing a cheating, abusive, misogynist, white supremacist, ignorant, despotic liar to be above the law.
B) Therefore it is not the system that is corrupt. It is a corrupted minority who is pathetically acting as maggots feeding upon the rest of us.
C) It is High Time to get off of our butts and get that minority out of power. And doing away with the Electoral College could be a good start.

@Rodatheist Your vaunted 'Founding Fathers' wrote that Constitution way back in the 17 hundreds did it, and time and tides have changed a helluva lot since then have they not?
But, it seems to me, that absolutely NO-ONE has bothered in the slightest to try to keep this pseudo-democratic Constitution up to date with both the times and ways of the world.

@Triphid Actually, someone has. In fact they have done it 27 times and one of those changes was later reversed, so, it has had 28 changes. They are called amendments. And those amendments are proposed and ratified depending on the prevailing social conditions and the political will of the legislators and president in turn, at the federal and the State level.

@Rodatheist Only 27 Amendments in over 200 years in my opinion that sounds a bit on the lame side.

@Triphid I respect your opinion, but I don’t agree with it.

@Rodatheist Ah yes, that wonderful Constitution based, for the major part upon the 1776 Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson penned the words " Where ALL men are created Equal," BUT conveniently forgot to add the words " UNLESS you ARE of Indigenous Native American or Black African Origins" then you will either be classed as ( to using a VILE Nazi terminology here) being "Untermensch" and either enslaved or exterminated to our best abilities.

@Triphid The documents are excellent pieces of legislation, as legislation goes. What people went ahead and did is a different story. If I issue a law that says "Murdering a human being is prohibited" and then I murder someone. the problem is not in the law I issued (which you have to agree it is an excellent and indeed necessary law) but in my murderous actions. So you see, the Constitution and the amendments stand on their own regardless of the actions of humans. It is the human endeavor to stride to become as perfect as the laws decree.

6

Vote Republicans out of office!

Now, THAT’S the spirit!! And the solution.

Enclose Humpty Trumpty in a 12x 8 prison cell for life in Spandau Prison for the TERM of HIS and Their Natural Lives along with his ENTIRE Administration and ALL who either supported him and it, profited from it or from the seizing of these children.
Show the whole WORLD and the Universe that WE WILL no longer remain silent nor stand for such BLATANT abuses of Human Rights ever again.

6

This alone is reason enough for every member of that "administration", from 45 on down, to be convicted of felony child abuse.
45 and Stephen Miller should both be publicly executed for what they have done to all those children and their families.

2

I would say that I'm shocked but I'm not because I've been reading this in the back pages of not necessarily mainstream news sources they've been doing it since he took office. These people are not from Mexico they are from central american countries who economies were destroyed by our large corporations and of course the drug trade. IMO
AND WOW IS THAT GOING TO BE ONE F***** UP GROUP OF KIDS. 😣 MAGA bullshit

The economy of Central American countries was destroyed by the support of the U.S. government for puppet regimes and their oppressive military forces. Think Reagan, Nicaraguan Contras, Salvadoran Civil War. The U.S. created that mess.
Now there is a Mexican Comprehensive Development Plan to grow those countries economies to stop migration of their populations. The U.S. pledged 5.8 billion dollars, Mexico pledged 4 billion dollars, and many other countries like Canada, Australia, Japan, and entities like The European Union offered their support.

5

Yet still the Judeo-Christian Taliban over there pander to the Distraction in Chief.

You're not going to get him and his cohorts on this. The USA was one of the original signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Successive governments cannot even abide by the US Constitution and its Amendments, let alone that, and that really is a neoliberalism thing, not a left or right thing. His Orange Majesty has simply taken that to a new level.

This is going to have to be done the way the FBI got Al Capone. Focus on what you can get him for. Set aside outrage about the things you can't or are highly unlikely to be successful trying to stem, and go for what will get the job done.

We are being tested, folks. Across the world, this is a test. How much injustice will you tolerate in the name of your confirmation biases? We all have them, it's no good saying we don't. How far?

Professor Noam Chomsky says this isn't fascism. It's overt authoritatarianism but it isn't fascism. I agree with him up to a point. Okay, it's not exactly 1930s Germany. A lot of the rhetoric is the same though, and a lot of the results are coming out the same.

Focusing on just the USA and the UK, the staggering amounts of deaths in the last few years of people whose sole crime is to fall ill or be disabled beggars belief, yet still these increasingly right-wing governments are returned to power to wreak more harm on the innocent, on those with little or no voice to defend themselves. Still the mechanisms whereby we might have a place to have our voices heard are quietly dismantled or defunded, all in the name of ideological austerity fanaticism that has demonstrably made things worse, not better.

The excuses I've seen, even from otherwise reasonable, compassionate people, for dehumanising and otherising, it worries me. It doesn't matter if this is fascism per se. It's more like neofeudalism, but if the results are the same, what's the difference? It's the same fountain of faeces, it's simply found a new means to its end.

If none of that moves you, tell me this. Set aside the adults. Try to pretend they don't exist. You are putting small children, some of them disabled, some with autism or ADHD or other conditions in dog cages. Ignore everything else and tell me you're okay with that.

6

And yet, the xtion evangels think this shit is fine. Things like this make me want Hell to exist so I can met them there and welcome their hypocritical asses properly.

They don't just think he's fine, they think he's the Second Coming. I you not, some of the stuff I've seen lately makes my mind ask "What the exploding tribble happened to 'thou shalt not have any other gods before me'?" Elements of the Judeo-Christian Taliban are threatening civil war if he's impeached, for illegal stuff that gets one impeached if one is President of the United States. Not made up stuff, real stuff. The same Taliban who flew into apoplexy about a president who lied about a blow job (which he shouldn't have and should have been held to for), but won't apply the same laws to their guy.

I'd gladly be their escort to the 5th circle of He'll..and sip on champagne doing so..😈😈😈😈

4

I think he can and should be impeached for this horrible offense.

4

Horrendous!

7

There seems to be no limit to Trump's depravity.

He's an international embarassment. When I go abroad, and people ask where I'm from, I want to tell them I'm from Canada.

@BestWithoutGods I stand for America, not for the idiot Trump.

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