One Small Voice: At long last, have we no shame?

by Lynn Mandaville

There are no two ways about it.

The United States, with the authority of the President, has kidnapped Central American children from their parents or the guardians who took responsibility for delivering them to safe haven in America.

By way of the government agencies of the US Border Patrol, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and Homeland Security, we have interned these kidnapped children in the equivalent of concentration camps along the U.S. border with Mexico.

The camps are protected by armed guards.  The children are in cages where they have no beds, only concrete floors or thin mats to sleep on under foil tarps.  The lights are on 24 hours a day, and it is cold.  So very cold.

The children are sleep-deprived because of these conditions.  They are denied basic hygiene products, such as soap, toothbrushes or toothpaste.  But the lack of soap probably doesn’t matter much, because they are denied access to bathing or showering facilities.  And there is no one to wash the little ones, or clean them when they soil their clothing or diapers.  If there are diapers.  Young teen girls are caring, sporadically and insufficiently, for the toddlers and infants.  Agents are forbidden to touch, or hold, or comfort these anguished kids.

We hear that there have been outbreaks of lice among the kids, and a flu-like illness is spreading among them.  A few have had to be evacuated to hospitals where their conditions are grave.  Since the internment began in earnest early this year, seven children have died in custody of US agents.  Such deaths have not occurred in past decades of detaining immigrants at the border.

If we were at war with Mexico or the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the United States would be guilty of war crimes.  The conditions to which our country is subjecting these children, if inflicted upon prisoners of war, would be in violation of the Geneva Convention.

The abject fear that our president has instilled in these refugees is nothing short of terrorism.

The fact that news agencies are barred from touring these concentration camps suggests that conditions are atrocious.  When doctors were allowed to inspect the camps they were appalled by the filth, the shortages of food and water, the lack of adult supervision or care of the youngest of the prisoners.

When one facility finally allowed a press tour of the detention center, the press did find that an attempt had been made to spruce things up.  In a storage room they found crate after crate of toothbrushes.  The toothbrushes were still in their packaging.  The press also encountered local citizens trying to provide basic necessities to the center (presumably soap, clean clothes, diapers, etc.), which were being declined by the agents in charge.

Reports abound that many of these facilities are run by for-profit corporations, charging what amounts to approximately $775 per child per day, yet the amenities aren’t even as good as an American pet would receive at a kennel for a fraction of that price.

It occurs to me that our racist president, consciously or subconsciously, is conducting his own genocide of Latin American people through deliberate neglect and deprivation.  He is undermining the morale of thousands of innocent people who are seeking relief from all manner of conditions in their home countries from our nation, once considered the most generous and compassionate Christian country in the world.  And he is attempting to rationalize this conduct by painting with a broad brush an entire ethnic group as violent criminals.

And while he allows this unspeakable event to unfold, he deflects blame (which though that blame can be shared, it is in a past about which nothing can be done) on a previous administration instead of acting to stop the suffering.

He throws tantrums to coerce billions of dollars to build an ill-conceived wall, when he could simply declare a national emergency and divert the necessary funding to solve the crisis and morph the camps into something more efficient, effective, and humane.

Very simply put, there is absolutely no excuse for perpetuating the inhumane practices and conditions being imposed on these refugees.

Evangelicals who speak in favor of allowing this to continue have forfeited their rights to be called Christians, as have any adherents to any other faith that holds human life sacred forfeited their rights to be called a disciple of that religion.

President Trump is showing the world that the United States of America has no soul.  He is establishing for each and every one of us Americans a reputation for cruelty, for causing intentional anguish, and for psychological abuse that we may never overcome.

There is no way to rationalize or sugarcoat what is happening now.

We must demand that it end immediately.  Or how will our children and grandchildren live with the stigma of parents and grandparents complicit with the insanity and cruelty of a terrorist and war criminal when we could have stopped him?