Pirate's Cove

This is what you voted for or something, as Rolling Stone’s Jamil Smith offers up some serious selective outrage

Trump’s Separation of Children and Families Is What You Voted For
The shocking immigration and refugee scandal is a symptom of a much larger disease

Ms. L, as the American Civil Liberties Union identified her, is a Congolese woman who sought asylum in the United States last November. She feared imminent death amid the escalating violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, violence that has displaced millions of residents. I learned about her circumstance reading Rex Huppke’s columns in the Chicago Tribune earlier this year. He wrote about Ms. L because President Trump’s immigration policy separated her from her six-year-old daughter, who ended up in Chicago. Ms. L was in San Diego. Both were essentially incarcerated.

Ms. L was not an undocumented immigrant (true, she was an illegal alien, someone who entered the U.S. without the proper permissions). She arrived in California out of fear for her daughter’s life and her own. She complied with every procedure. Yet despite persuading immigration officials that their plight was real, the two were separated and held by the government – the daughter, “S.S.,” housed in a Chicago Health and Human Services facility while her mother was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. No reason was given. When the ACLU filed suit to reunite them, Homeland Security argued that there was insufficient proof that Ms. L was the mother, and that there were fears of human trafficking. Only after four months of separation and a DNA test were they finally reunited. S.S. was then seven years old. Her mother had missed her birthday.

I’m not even a parent yet, and her story makes me physically ill. For all the frankness and shock value inherent in American political coverage, so often we avoid calling things as we see them. It is too rash, too ill advised, we are told, to label something with blunt terms, lest we set the conversation askew – or, Heaven forbid, lose access to a certain politician.

There’s a simple solution: don’t allow people to come to the U.S. illegally. Likewise, if people do not want to be separated from their kids, do not come to the U.S. illegally. Problem solved.

This is a presidency that calls for strong language. Trump uses a different brand of speech, a rhetoric dominated by gaslighting and laced with overt appeals to the misplaced cultural resentment of white Americans. The Trump policy of immigrant family separation is evil made flesh. Perhaps there are other words to describe a government doing this to an asylum seeker and her young child – or any immigrant, for that matter – but “evil” would be the most precise.

Evil made flesh! And you voted for it! And the word “evil” is used many times. Though it’s missing when we get all the way to paragraph 15

The United States treating immigrants like garbage is not unique to the Trump administration, as the ACLU proved last week when they released a report detailing a “culture of impunity” within U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security that shrugged at physical and emotional abuses within the immigration system. Photos of immigrant children sleeping in fenced cages made their way onto social media. That all happened under Obama, who deported more undocumented immigrants than the three presidents who preceded him combined. Despite Obama’s open compassion for the plight of refugees, there was always a heartlessness in his application of immigration law. That said, he didn’t weaponize the flaws in our immigration system as Trump has.

Funny, it’s almost like Jamil is excusing Obama doing pretty much the same darned thing, perhaps worse, than Trump. And most Democrat voters weren’t particularly concerned about this when the reports were released during Obama’s presidency. Go figure.