The Trump administration has been facing an intense wave of public outrage after the news of that their “zero-tolerance” anti-illegal immigration policy included the separation of children, including infants, from their parents and the incarceration of both parties in for-profit detention centers before deporting the adults and dumping the children into America’s already-overburdened and underfunded foster care system.
On top of that, it is quickly becoming clear that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and the Border Patrol have failed – likely on purpose – to maintain adequate recordkeeping and are now unable to reunite at least 38 children under the age of five with their parents.
Now the nation is being treated to an exercise in the banality of evil with the Trump administration’s latest legal battle against the ACLU over a deadline to reunite lost toddlers with their parents, which they’re arguing they can’t do because the lawyer has to dog sit this weekend.
JUST IN: Federal judge agrees to delay next meeting about extending deadline to reunite 101 children under the age of 5 until Monday because Trump administration lawyer has “dog sitting responsibilities” this weekend.@JuliaEAinsley
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) July 6, 2018
Here’s the verbatim exchange from today’s status conference in the Southern District of California, via @JuliaEAinsley pic.twitter.com/W6PLkCr7zi
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) July 6, 2018
These children are at the height of their formative years, and the trauma and the terror that is being inflicted upon them is going to have destructive effects for years – and for their suffering to be extended for another weekend simply because it is inconvenient for the Department of Justice’s lawyer is beyond infuriating.
The casual cruelty of this entire nightmare and the Trump administration’s increasingly obvious hostility to legal immigrants makes it clear that this has nothing to do with any of the bullshit national security or economic excuses the President and his ghoulish cronies spout on social media.
This is about punishing people of color for being different and driving them out of the United States. This is about the soft ethnic cleansing of the United States and the protection of the rapidly collapsing white Christian demographic and the socioeconomic dominance that accompanies it, and we cannot simply sit by as the families of innocent opportunity-seekers are torn apart forever before our very eyes.
Abolishing ICE has to be the beginning. Those responsible for this horrendous defilement of the American Dream have to be prosecuted and punished before we dismantle the deportation machine once and for all and find a humane way to regulate who and what comes over the border.
