Caging Children Did Not Begin With Trump

I am deeply grateful to Ellin Jimmerson for her powerful and needed voice of truth.

Too often we believe that Trump is The Problem rather than understanding that he is a late stage symptom of the brutal entrenched neoliberal predatory capitalist system and its policies perpetuated by both corrupted political parties.

It’s my deepest hope that complacency and complicity with the poisonous status quo won’t follow the ousting of the current malignancy in the White House. The cancer will still be there, although less obvious to many. And this needs to change. The transformation of the longstanding shadow side of our nation will require an educated and courageous populace.

As we let go of our attachment to identities as "democrats" or "republicans" we emerge into a larger space where greater consciousness, truth, and vision evolves and expands. This is when we come to realize that the entire ideology of domination will need to be seen for what it is and dismantled within our minds, our politics and policies, and our cultural belief systems and values. 

 

The radical systemic changes long, long needed in America to become an authentically democratic and just nation will require our ongoing voices of truth, collective activism, and fierce love in the ongoing struggle for racial, economic, social, and environmental justice. We are all needed to be part of this Loving Revolution! — Molly

 

"In our time, when high technology guided by values such as conquest, exploitation, and domination threaten our very survival, we need economics driven by an ethos of caring. We need a caring revolution."  

— Riane Eisler 

 

In this June 18, 2014 photo, two female detainees sleep in a holding cell, as the children are separated by age group and gender, at a US Customs and Border Protection center in Nogales, Arizona.

Caging Children Did Not Begin With Trump

 

Whether we like it or not, Trump was correct when he said that the Obama administration built the cages.

I know how many of you will deconstruct that statement in ways that seek to draw a distinction between Biden and Trump. I get that. Nonetheless, we need to be realistic.

It may be true that over 500 children will never be reunited with their families. We cannot just leave that there, true though it may be.

It is also true that deportation rips families apart, often permanently. Obama/Biden/Clinton deported nearly 3 million people, leaving some 5,000 children without their parents and who were then placed in foster care. Some were adopted by people not their parents nor their relatives and have lost court cases by which the natural parents sought to be reunited with their child. I heard many stories during the Obama years of federal agents snatching nursing babies from the breasts of their mothers for deportation purposes.

It is also true that the only immediate way for a deported family member to be reunited with his/her family left behind is by attempting to cross through our heavily militarized southern border and a policy of "prevention through deterrence" which seeks to murder people in order to control them. A policy which has claimed a minimum of 8,000 lives.

The cages were indeed built by the Obama administration. While it is true that the high number of unaccompanied minors who came in 2014 had to be cared for in some way. That way was to place them in cages where they stayed for long periods of time.

What is equally true is that Hillary Clinton acknowledged the children would be safer in the US than in Honduras, for example, but that they should be returned to send a message. And return those children Obama/Biden did, certainly to poverty and often to their deaths.

And why were so many unaccompanied minors coming from Honduras in 2014? Because Obama/Biden/Clinton gave military support to the illegal coup d'etat of Manuel Zelaya who had been making strides toward well-being for Hondurans via working class and indigenous rights reform and which the Dole corporation and others found abhorrent and detrimental to their bottom lines. A coup which sent the Central American country into a downward spiral into poverty, femicide, LGBT persecution, and indigenous assassinations, none of which should have been a surprise to anyone who understands what happens when the US backs illegal coups d'etat.

It is also true that cruelty to the point of sadism towards detained children during Obama/Biden's first administration (2009-2014) has been well documented to the tune of 30,000 pages which the ACLU gained access to through a successful FOIA lawsuit. Those documents detail in harrowing detail the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children by agents of the federal government. You can google and easily find the ACLU's report.

It is also true that the Obama administration tried to get child prisons run by private corporations labeled "day care centers".

It is also true that the mass incarceration of peoples made possible in large part by Biden's crime package necessarily puts children at risk and necessarily separates them from their families. The cause traumas that cannot be undone.

Vote for Biden. That's fair. I get that. But please don't diminish what the Obama/Biden/Clinton administration was nor how it permanently traumatized millions of people none of whom deserved it.

One of the principles of Christianity is to bear witness. It is to bear witness to the wrongdoings of Caesar and his minions and to bear witness to the catastrophic suffering they cause.

 

 —

Ellin Jimmerson

 

Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children were being processed and held at the CBP Nogales Placement Center on June 18, 2014.