Children are being awakened in the middle of the night so that they can be moved with minimum public notice to a concentration camp near Tornillo, Texas. They have no school and minimal access to legal aid. Although this latest article has no overall numbers, what I have seen is in the range of 13,000, spread across who knows how many “shelters.”
It’s pretty clear that the administration has no plans for dealing with these children, only an intention to make people who try to cross the border miserable. Accommodations have been ad hoc from the start.
What happens as more children are collected and those in custody stay there? This is a large number of people to take care of. They are emotionally traumatized. They are not receiving schooling. There will be sexual and other assaults.
What happens as there is no provision to get them back to family? What happens as the numbers grow?
There are two relatively recent historical answers to the questions. During World War II, between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese were extracted from their homes and made to live in camps in the interior of the country. Most of them made it back to something like normal lives, although many lost most of their property. The children were interned with their families.
The other historical example does not end even that well.
JPL
This is so sickening, and we have a president who constantly changes subjects in not a good way. The media doesn’t have the opportunity to just concentrate on one thing.
Cheryl Rofer
The media can make choices about what they pursue. But yes, there are a great many crises of Trump’s making to track.
Cheryl Rofer
This is only one reason we need a Democratic Congress. There must be hearings on this to force the administration into action to make these children and their families whole.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JPL:
That’s something com-men rely on and are quite skilled at.
JPL
@Cheryl Rofer: I don’t mean to disparage anyone, but it’s like watching a group of three year old children with attention deficit. It’s exhausting and maybe that’s the purpose.
Thank you for the post.
Emerald
Might these camps have anything to do with the private prison industry? I can think of no other motivation, aside from the simple enjoyment of cruelty.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: con-men…Oh for an edit capability…
PaulWartenberg
When the Democrats get back to any semblance of power in the federal government THEY BETTER F-CKING INVESTIGATE THIS AND ARREST PEOPLE FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. We let the CIA and the Bush/Cheney Torture Regime off the hook for their BS. WE DARE NOT LOOK AWAY FROM THE HORROR THAT IS HAPPENING IN OUR OWN NATION.
JPL
@?BillinGlendaleCA: That’s why he won.
JPL
@PaulWartenberg: Even if they win, the media will continue to interview Tim Cotton and other traitors.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I keep learning over and over…they do not care. All the things people capable of empathy care about? They don’t. It’s shocking.
Emerald
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s worse than that. They truly enjoy being cruel. It makes them feel powerful, I guess.
Cheryl Rofer
@Emerald: The private prison industry is making a great deal of money out of this.
ant
traditional family values
vtr
Is there one person in this place whose politics are to the right of Dwight Eisenhower, for example, who can comprehend that we reap what we sow? Just one?
James E Powell
@Emerald:
@JPL:
Contra JPL, above, with respect, this is why Trump won.
MagdaInBlack
What brings me the most sadness is that this does not surprise me.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@James E Powell: They’re also an extraordinary about of fear too. This is something we saw with Bush as well.
trollhattan
I wish everybody had the opportunity to see the Tule Lake camp site. Bleak doesn’t begin to describe….
Such enlightenment here in the 21st century.
Cermet
When you said:
As I understand it, their property was essentially stolen by seizure and foreclosure. Locals (meaning whites) buying it up for pennies on the dollar
Martin
@Emerald: I don’t think they enjoy being cruel, but the power things is clear. Nice article on where we are with the Kavanaugh hearing.
And that’s really been the whole narrative since Obama was elected. McConnell denying his supreme court nominee was just an exercise in who is allowed to wield power. Graham’s statement:
Trump dismantling everything that Obama touched, regardless of whether it benefitted Republicans or not. There’s nothing conservative in those actions, it’s merely an exercise in declaring that anything a woman or minority touched should be destroyed by virtue of them touching it. I don’t know if Flake can see it or not – I doubt it. But I think he senses just how dangerous this moment has become. Locking up kids in the desert doesn’t accomplish anything other than demonstrating what the white patriarchy can and is willing to do, and thats the only real reason why they do it.
Martin
@vtr: They’ve been fighting this case for 400 years. In all that time they haven’t given up. Why would they now?
NotMax
Ought to add that the children are also being involuntarily and without legal consent drugged.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan:
I’ve been to Manzanar.
Suzanne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
And yet they go through mental gymnastics of unbelievable caliber to convince themselves that they’re good people. This just boggles my mind.
I am increasingly of the opinion that the only solution is to move away from it. Perhaps I’m saying that because I have been living in a really Republican milieu, mixed in with a lot of recent documented and undocumented Latinx. So, you know, it’s pleasant.
I really just want to pay off my house and basically secede from society at this point. This shit is demoralizing.
Cheryl Rofer
@Cermet: Yup. Remarkably like what happened in that other country.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Suzanne:
Then they’ve won.
scav
@Suzanne: Their mental gymnastics proving to themselves their necessary and inviolate goodness are actually pretty minimal, given that they’ve renounced logic and empiricism: They’re white, republican and sit their asses on pews occasionally. Thus forgiven: all actions without consequences.
Oh — and they’re all virgins.
A Ghost To Most
@Martin:
They seem to enjoy it a great deal.
NotMax
@scav
There is no good without doing good.
Ella in New Mexico
Caught this article the other day at High Country News about “Indian Schools” which reminds me that even while we have some incredible people in this country, we’ve always had an element that was all too willing to treat whatever group they deem as “other” worse than they’d treat an animal.
We’ll always be fighting our darkness in this country. But we’ve done it before and God-damn it even if history is trying as hard as it can to repeat itself, we must fight back.
scav
@NotMax: Haven’t they traditionally denied the need for deeds, claiming one is justified by faith alone? Sola fide.
burnspbesq
@PaulWartenberg:
I’m sure you’d be happy to tell us which part of Title 18 makes “crimes against humanity” a Federal crime.
Law is not Calvinball.
Cheryl Rofer
@Ella in New Mexico: Thanks. I needed that.
Brachiator
@JPL: This president and this administration has been consistent and relentless in persecuting undocumented people.
The UK Guardian and a few others try to cover this well. But it also gets tougher as newspapers and magazines go out of business. You have fewer reporters and fewer veteran reporters able to cover this.
It would also be useful to have a reporter who has a relationship with this administration and who could tell you what they will do next, not just what they are doing now.
Some citizens seem to believe that the US is running out of “stuff,” and illegal immigrants must be kept out or real legitimate pure noble Americans won’t have enough to eat, or enough time to enjoy their videogames.
Suzanne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Yes. I fear that they have.
NotMax
@scav
I know next to nothing about religions or religious tenets, having never paid them any heed, but isn’t faith supposed to be the inception and not the terminus?
Emerald
@Suzanne: So do I. Justice* Kavanaugh is going to do an incredible amount of damage, starting with stopping Mueller from turning his stuff over to the states, and continuing on with reinstating Jim Crow.
They may lose the midterms, but they won’t lose anything else for a long time to come. We’re going to need a Maidan movement to get rid of them.
I’ve no doubt that eventually we will get rid of them, but it’s going to take awhile.
Luthe
Isn’t this a blatant violation of the Flores ruling?
Ksmiami
@Emerald: then we tear down the Supreme Court -nothing lasts forever
Tenar Arha
@Cheryl Rofer:
I can too easily imagine exactly what’s happening inside these journeys & concentration camps. There’s already been major disruption in these kids lives & even deaths from neglect in shelters. There’ll be more preventable deaths in these places from neglect.
I’m not sure if the paper realizes that this, above almost everything else, makes me truly hate the men & women ordering this policy, & even the ones carrying it out. This needs trials, & jail time, & perhaps later some kind of required amends as part of restorative justice.
Tenar Arha
@Cheryl Rofer: Addendum
(I’ve been thinking lately of how complicit the NYT is in our present debacle. I just don’t know how to react to their own coverage of this horror, when if they’d looked at their own archives they could have seen where this Admin would head, & then I’m furiously angry about 2016 again).
Cheryl Rofer
@Tenar Arha: The NYT is a mixed bag. They do some good reporting, but they have some weird, and far too strong, political leanings. I say “political leanings” because I suspect that the inclinations are very deeply buried in people’s minds (like the publisher’s and the higher-level editors’), the way Kavanaugh’s privilege is buried in his. And there probably are some similarities among people with money.
I subscribe, both for the good reporting and to keep an eye on the rest of it.
TenguPhule
@burnspbesq:
it is now.
mere mortal
Thirteen thousand kids in detention centers are a $3.3 billion dollar per year industry.
With almost zero oversight.
Follow the money.
Dice
Child Laborers
Children between the ages of 10 and 14 were among the foreign nationals forced to work in Krupp factories. Many had been seized on the streets of Eastern European countries by the Wehrmacht during the chaos of war, then deported to Germany to work in factories. As court documents indicate, Krupp officials were not pleased about receiving shipments of children from Reich Labor allocations; nevertheless, they trained and used them as laborers.
Infants of Slave Laborers
The youngest victims of forced labor at Krupp were infants who died in the care of Krupp employees. Babies born to forced laborers at Krupp were taken from their mothers, often women from Eastern European countries, approximately six weeks after birth, then placed in the Krupp Voerde West Children’s Camp northwest of Essen near the Dutch border. Many infants died of malnutrition, although the total number is unknown. One official record kept by a registrar in Voerde listed 88 infant deaths in 7 months between fall 1944 and early 1945. Among the listed causes of death were rickets, “general weakness,” “nutritional disturbances,” tuberculosis, and air raids.”
—Nürnberg Krupp Trial Papers of Judge Hu C. Anderson