As President Trump goads crowds of white people toward hateful racist chants, our taxes are still paying to harm children and families who seek asylum in America. The journalist Aura Bogado, of Reveal News, points out that new facilities are opening. One has 12 children under 5 years old and no mothers.
Records obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting indicate a dozen children arrived at Child Crisis Arizona starting in mid-June, after it garnered a $2.4 million contract to house unaccompanied children through January 2022.
The kids, some of whom entered the facility as recently as Thursday and hail from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador and Brazil, are each living in Child Crisis without a parent.
It’s unclear where the children’s parents are located. Child Crisis didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The Office of Refugee Resettlement told Reveal on Friday that it’s working on a response to our questions about the whereabouts of the children’s parents.
Read the rest of the story to learn of the bad conditions these poor children are forced to live in. Who is getting this $2.4 million? Torrie Taj is the CEO of Child Crisis Arizona, a non-profit that is housing the children. There is also a non-profit called Southwest Key making hundreds of millions of dollars staining the history of America. Southwest Key spent $60,000 lobbying the government in 2018. It’s CEO, Juan Sanchez of Austin, TX, made a million and a half dollars before stepping down this spring. Open Secrets shows a Juan J. Sanchez of Austin donated $5,100 to the Republican Party of Arizona in October 2018. That’s corruption. It’s important that we keep focus on the racist actions of our government even as the President spouts more racist phrases.
And, on the other hand, we have citizens stepping up, making an effort to fight the dehumanization. One such person is an academic who works at UMass Amherst, Charli Carpenter. I recommend you read these three posts she wrote. While many disparage academia for being isolated from humanity, it is clear that our public universities are not isolated but doing work that needs to be done if America is going to become a more perfect union.
This is an example of why the Democrats can blow 2020. We take a situation that is cruel and frankly unimaginable with regards to treatment of children and families at the border. And we take this moral high ground and instead of focusing on this moral outrage, and not only do we change the subject, we give our opponents a talking point that allows them to hijack the debate. That of course is the #AbolishICE hashtag. This is one of many unforced errors we regularly commit and gives the keys to the White House for another 4 years.
Hmm. It seems to me that by this argument it would be an “unforced error” to demand that Germany abolish Stasi or Russia abolish Stalin’s NKVD. Each of those was also created with an ostensibly legitimate purpose. Whatever legitimate purpose the ICE originally claimed, it is now our home-grown equivalent to these despicable entities. I’m turning linguistic handsprings to avoid the obvious comparison to Hitler’s Brown Shirts. The ICE is not — that we know of — summarily executing people on the street. It is nevertheless committing crimes against humanity ordered by the President.
If you are correct that insisting that we abolish this institution that has become synonymous with tyranny is an “unforced error”, or that it will “blow 2020”, then the America I love is already dead.
As with your recent use of the word “jihad” you seem completely tone deaf to how easily the opposition ads will write themselves – “SomervilleTom wants to abolish ICE and thus leave us with no border enforcement.” Much better to say better oversight and standards for how we treat asylum seekers and the undocumented.
And you, in turn, seem oblivious to the awful reality of what our nation is doing today.
I know what is going on and I want it to stop, but we have to do better rhetorically than simply “abolish ICE” because that’s all some are going to hear.
We must reform our immigration laws so that they are reasonable and just, and so that they reflect the values and priorities that America is built on. We must reshape our implementation of those reformed immigration laws so that they are largely obeyed. That includes, among other things:
1. Stiff prosecutions and penalties for employers who import and knowingly hire illegal immigrants
2. Streamlined immigration processing so that getting a Green Card is approximately as hard and takes approximately as long as getting a Driver’s License
3. Clear recognition and exemptions for those seeking asylum from violent and threatening governments.
Abolishing the ICE is part of that process. Those who hear only “Abolish ICE” and ignore the rest are beyond reach anyway.
Would it have been possible to reform Stasi or NKVD in the way you suggest? If such a reform had been attempted by East Germany or Russia, do you think it could have been successful? In my view, the abuses of Stasi and the NKVD were so deeply entwined in their organizational DNA that no “reform” would have ever succeeded.
Most people of color and most immigrants believe that ICE is similarly too far gone to successfully reform. I agree with them.
The people who would write the ads I mention are lost to us, but I’m more concerned about the low information voter who will hear and read the ads and be persuaded by them. I’m actually not sure about #1 above. I’ve never been convinced that immigration status should be the employer’s concern. What I would do is grant immunity to those who are here illegally when they come forward to blow the whistle if their employer is underpaying or mistreating them because they think they can get away with it.
@ not sure about item 1:
Many employers knowingly and intentionally import illegal immigrants so that those immigrants can be denied wages, social security, workplace protections, and so on. It happens all the time, especially in the hospitality and construction industries.
I’m not talking about the various paperwork fire-drills requiring employers to effectively act as government agents. I’m instead talking about employers who intentionally import illegal immigrants in order to exploit them.
If immigration status should not be an employer’s concern, then how is it possible to defend employers who are shown to seek out illegal immigrants in order to exploit them?
My goal is to get to the point where employers can’t exploit illegal immigrants any more than they could the rest of us because said immigrants would have the same protections and not risk having their status used against them if they report employer abuse. I would still penalize those who actively and deliberately import illegal immigrants, but I was referring to those who would be genuinely ignorant of an applicant’s immigration status if they did not have to ask.
Any politician worth electing can easily say “We must replace the ICE with an organization that reflects our collective respect for humanity” or something to that effect.
Of course better oversight and standards are required. That oversight and standards was provided by the “United States Immigration and Naturalization Service” (INS) from 1933 until 2003. The ICE is a Frankenstein created in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It has long since served its legitimate purpose.
The continued existence of this agency is an insult to every person of color and to every immigrant, regardless of immigration status.
It’s all about messaging. And saying “the need to reorganize the mission of agencies within Homeland Securities to better respond to border and immigration needs” is a lot better than handing your opponent a gift. It’s a terrible hash tag, but it is not suicide as well.
Even you caught yourself, conceding the your comparison of ICE to Stasi or the NKVD was exaggerated, why do you want to give your opponent such an oversized target?
Why can’t we just keep the focus on the misdeeds of the evils the GOP/Trump is committing and pass on the counterproductive stuff. I’m in this to win it. I’m mad as hell and disgusted at what is happening as well. Winning and being outraged do not have to be mutually exclusive. Let’s get the power and “reorganize” ICE out of existence. But let’s get the power.
Even Stasi and NKVD were not nearly as extreme as Hitler’s Brown Shirts. I did not concede anything about the ICE versus Stasi and NKVD, I stopped short of comparing ICE to the Brown Shirts.
This period is a dark stain on America. This makes our treatment of Japanese Americans in WWII look like child’s play. We have already made the name “ICE” synonymous with evil.
Your confidence in the electoral process is touching. We had the power to investigate and prosecute the war crimes of the George W. Bush administration in 2006 and we did nothing. We punted single-payer government-sponsored health care and then the public option in 2008 while we held a majority of all three branches of government without so much as a whisper. There is no scenario where we’ll have more power than that in 2020 — I see zero evidence that we’ll use that power to in any way solve this problem. We have the power to begin impeachment proceedings today and we are doing nothing.
It appears to me that Ms. Pelosi and the media are far more interested in perpetuating the current state of affairs than in solving it.
The real problem here is Americans, not Donald Trump and not the ICE. The fact that tens of millions of Americans either approve or tolerate the abuses of the ICE is absolutely shameful.
While some of us are agonizing about messaging, government agents are literally ripping babies from their mothers arms and locking up children in cages for weeks at a time.
The messaging I care about is wails of a six-month old baby and the eyes of the eleven year old looking out at me from the behind the fence erected with my tax dollars.
ICE agents terrorized this family without a warrant yesterday Monday.
Elsewhere this week, ICE improperly held a citizen THREE WEEKS — releasing him only when news of the improper imprisonment hit the media. How many others are there, that haven’t made the news?
From the piece (emphasis mine):
Once more, some of us — who are, like me, not subject to these abuses because of our race, the color of our skin and eyes, and our nationality — complain about the “messaging”.
Watch this video. Pay attention to these news reports.
This is what ugly official racist bigotry, practiced by government agents, looks like. THAT is the messaging I care about.
I’m both/and on this one. We need to make it clear that this specific agency is out of control and requires more oversight and a rebranding to regain the trust of citizens and immigrants alike. What we also need to make clear is that Democrats support secure borders-we just want to secure them humanely and realistically. No deportation squads, no detention centers, no family separations, and no magical walls Mexico will pay for.
Joe Kennedy and Ayanna Presley were masterful on this issue on Greater Boston a few weeks ago and their messaging is better than Seth Moulton voting to praise ICE on the right or AOC wanting to abolish them on the left. It’s a bedrock liberal principle that people who are here illegally should be allowed to stay if they meet certain conditions and follow certain rules. It’s also a bedrock liberal principle that borders should exist and be enforced-in a smart and compassionate way. I worry the left is pushing further than the old Obama consensus.
It is? I thought the bedrock liberal principle was more akin to that quote at the base of the Statue of Liberty. I know quite a few liberals who are explicitly open borders supporters they just don’t express it publicly because they think it is too radical and “what will the centrists think!?!” I think it’s similar to gun prohibition – there’s a lot of people that want that but they won’t say it because of fear of others thinking it is unreasonable.
“Strong” borders is an appeal to the racist tendencies of the vast middle (that’s of course why Trump picked that issue). I think that’s part of why Obama was so tough (and terrible) on this issue. He wanted to protect his flank politically – but of course trying to assuage the right never ever ever works. He was still considered soft on immigration.
ICE absolutely needs to be abolished. It is one of the moral imperatives of our time. And it is time now, before it becomes too powerful, too bloated, and too enmeshed in our culture. It may even be too late.
We must not forget that ICE is not a long-standing institution. It’s not even as old as the Fast and Furious franchise!