It is June of 2018 in the United States of America. Right now 550 children have been stripped from their parents and are being detained in over-crowded border stations funded by your tax dollars. Three hundred of these children are in custody for over the 72-hour period allowed by law. They are being held against their will away from their family. Held in a de facto concentration camp. This is happening now: June 2018. Here in the United States. Children. Detention Camps.
These are children of refugees seeking asylum. They have not been convicted of any crime — they have just been charged, and most have the valid defense that they are legitimately fleeing persecution. Seeking asylum at our borders is a legal right protected under U.S. law.
But law is a tricky thing for this present administration.
Who is good with this?
The United States federal government has demanded by writ of a “no tolerance” policy — another haphazardly thrown together tyrannical baby-tantrum by our game show president, echoed by his damaged and bleating troll of an attorney general and enacted by the puppets of this jack-booted regime. In a horrifying scene reminiscent of the mass exodus of Native Americans from their land during the 1830 Indian Removal Act signed by the monster on our twenty-dollar bill (Donald Trump’s hero), President Andrew Jackson, the Customs and Border Protection agents have been running out of space to shelter the hundreds of migrant children who have been separated from their parents at the United States border.
I am also reminded of another of Trump’s heroes, Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Operation Wetback, a truly ignominious slice of Americana enacted on Mexican Americans in 1954, which stunningly the current president of the United States heralded during several Republican debates. Or how about Franklin Roosevelt’s Japanese relocation camps?
Shall we go on?
Regardless of how you fall on this politically or ideologically or even (gulp!) morally, this is not how this whole concept of America is supposed to go, even when duly considering its ugly, petty, racist, violent past. This is 2018 and it is disgusting, embarrassing and pathetic.
This, I guess, is what all the hoopla surrounding the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison camp was about for the past seventeen years. My take has always been that once you practice in terrorism you then hand in your society ticket. But what exactly did these children do but be born?
Fun Fact: The idiots who support this are the same ones who cannot stop telling women what to do with their bodies to save “unborn children”, while these already fully formed children apparently don’t count.
Even the original plan for housing the children; keeping them in custody at U.S. border stations, and eventually military bases or detention facilities away from their parents, is so patently abhorrent it is hard to believe we can muster the anger to be pissed about some weird, self-absorbed hissy fit this child president conjured this week to keep professional black athletes from the White House for having the audacity to protest the systemic murder of innocents. This nonsense was all the rage this week, and more stuff about how whatever is left of Rudy Giuliani’s sanity, drowning out children being detained away from their parents at the border on our dime.
This has become Mr. Trump’s Iraq. Now we have, instead of U.S. Marines acting as traffic cops and relocation directors, Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement officers acting as babysitters. They are neither trained nor equipped for caring for in many cases mere toddlers. That’s correct, I’m writing this right now; toddlers are alone, being cared for by strangers with no experience in this.
All of this might not be the sexiest news, but it will soon be history. This generation will have to remember this and it will be another sad chapter in our long putrid story of lunatics besmirching the very flag and institutions this joke president and his cabal spend all their hot air defending.
It is during these times when Twain’s “we get the leaders we deserve” axiom comes home for me. This is our country now. This is where we have sunk; Refugee children being ripped from parents and detained with our money. You are paying for this. Let it sink in. You work, they take part of your earnings, and then enact this egregious shit. You and me, we own this. It is ours.
Does this feel right to you?
The actions of this banana republic, this soulless, mean-spirited machine, are our current legacy. I ask, and the answer may be yes, and for that, I cannot argue; but is any of this acceptable to you?
Children.
Detainment camps.
June of 2018 in the United States of America.
Do yourself no favors and “like” this idiot at www.facebook.com/jc.author or, if you dare, follow on Twitter (@FearNoArt) and Instagram (@jamescampion)
James Campion is the Managing Editor of The Reality Check News & Information Desk and the author of “Deep Tank Jersey”, “Fear No Art”, “Trailing Jesus”, “Midnight For Cinderella” and “Y”. “Shout It Out Loud – The Story of KISS’s Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon”
And coming in June, 2018; “Accidentally Like a Martyr – The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon”
