President Trump is waging a war on people of color along the border. He’s been dehumanizing undocumented immigrants since he first launched his campaign by referring to them en masse as rapists and criminals, propaganda specifically aimed at sowing the idea that they deserve whatever harsh measures Trump imposes on them.
Now we are seeing the horrific consequences of the president’s racist rhetoric. The children of undocumented immigrants are being kidnapped, separated from their families, and thrown into cages inside concentration camps. The emotional and psychological trauma is so severe that some of the kids are even trying to kill themselves rather than endure their inhumane situation any longer.
Now, Colleen Kraft, the President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has landed on the perfect description for Trump’s child separation policy: child abuse. Kraft described her trip to one of the child concentration camps, and what she witnessed was heartbreaking.
“I can’t describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers. Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. And we had this one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. And this is not normal activity or brain development with these children. The takeaway is that these children need their parents,” Kraft said.
She went on to assert that it amounts to “government sanctioned child abuse” and explains how badly these children have been traumatized on their trips to the border only to have their one remaining support system, their parents, torn away from them. Kraft says the imprisonment of these children constitutes “toxic stress” that could deeply affect their brain development.
She is absolutely right that these children must be immediately released and all efforts made to reunite them with their parents, a task that grows more difficult with each passing day of separation.
ICE has proven itself to be a fascist organization populated by rapists, pedophiles, and sadists. Every moment it continues to operate in the United States is a stain on this country’s conscience that will horrify future generations. It must be disbanded, and the criminals in its ranks immediately prosecuted.
