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  View of Tent City for Children from Latin America, near El Paso, Texas

    An Online Publication of the Anonymous Anything Society — November 28, 2018


ATROCIOUS: Extremely or shockingly wicked - according to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary

    In the early weeks following the infamous attack by Japan, the U.S. government put people of Japanese extraction in internment camps. The haphazard manner in which our government recently separated Hispanic children from their parents— who entered the U.S. illegally— is far more atrocious.

    I have been scouring the internet for weeks and there is one thing I know: The threat of taking children from parents of illegal entrants has not worked. The surge of Hispanics knocking at our gates is full of kids. What I have found is that the program, if you wish to call it that, was implemented, sort of, before agencies of the United States were ready to cope with the order. They probably never will be. At this writing, having the Army and Mexican troops at the border is a good thing, for the situation there is absolutely chaotic.

    President Barack Obama set some kind of a record for deporting criminals This hardly put a dent in the invasion. When Trump took over, someone thought of separating the kids from the parents, as a deterrent. Trump agreed that this was a good idea.

    So, now for years, we've been telling prospective immigrants that those who can document that they are suffering from violence (Due often to U.S. intervention in civil upheavals, anti-communist wars, peasant uprisings, the slaughter of religious workers, military killings of indigenous people on behalf of the rich landowners, drug wars, youth gangs and tin-pot dictators, etc.,etc), that if they hope to be legal entrants, supplicants should present themselves at the border stations and apply for asylum.

    At which time the President of the United States threatens them with incarceration and literally rips their children out of their arms, and removes the kids to only God knows where and, no surprise, neglects to keep adequate records.

    This is not fake news. This is nothing less than an atrocity. I don't know what I would do, if this happened to me.

    The first people these kids encounter are Border Patrol Officers, all of whom we trust are conscientious agents who have had little or no training in caring for children. So an uncertain number of the babies and toddlers are sent to foster parents as an Investigative arm of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) determines if the parents' claims are valid. This is implemented piecemeal, and everything I have learned about this situation is infuriating. It will take forever to process the present number of asylum applicants, even if it is funded as inadequately as that stupid border fence.

    Older Kids are put in detention camps. See the view above of the first tent city for older kids. Associated Press reported that it was erected for 450 detainees at Tornillo border crossing, 30 miles east of El Paso, Texas, where the temperature hit 106 degrees this summer, but has grown to house 2,324 youngsters.

    One statistic has clouded the issue: Many older children were unaccompanied. Some are not related to those who brought them across. The only guesstimate I could find in my weekend search of the internet came from Alex Azar, of the Office of Refugee Settlement, a division of U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, who stated recently that "Under 3,000 children are still separated from their parents." I have always been skeptical of even numbers. No one really knows how many children and families are affected, and I've a real sense we will never know.

    One does not need to have a degree in child psychiatry to feel that this is going to mess-up, wholesale, a lot of young minds.

    Yes, the parents are to blame, if they are illegal entrants, but isn't there some way to keep the parents and children together in the detention camps? (I first used "concentration" camps, but felt that this echoed something that only Nazis did.)

TO BE CONTINUED

 

  -Phil Richardson, Observer of the Human Condition and Storyteller

    "He goes doddering on into his old age, making a public nuisance of himself."—Joseph Menchen


Our unending thanks to Jim Bromley, who programs our Archive of Prior Commentaries


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