6/24/19: Trump likes to claim that Democrats and those who disagree with him on how to address problems along the southern border don’t care about crime.
This is ludicrous.
Sometimes, our side cares about human beings, whereas the President of the United States does not.
Today, more than 300 migrant children, all of
whom had been separated from their families, were removed from an overcrowded
facility in Clint, Texas. Some had been held for almost a month. Conditions at
the station, meant to hold 100 people, have been described variously as “appalling,” “filthy,” “perilous” and “inhumane.”
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, was one outside observer who came to help. After touring the facility, she described what she saw.
None of the children had access
to soap or toothpaste…Almost every child I spoke with had not showered or
bathed since they crossed the border – some of them more than three weeks ago.
There is a stench that emanates from some of the children because they haven’t
had an opportunity to put on clean clothes and to take a shower.
I have never seen conditions as
appalling as what we witnessed last week. The children are hungry, dirty and
sick [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] and being
detained for very long periods of time.
Children who are young
themselves are being told by guards they must take care of even younger
children.
Mukherjee saw children as young as seven and eight caring for
toddlers in filthy diapers. Almost all the children had been separated from
adults with whom they crossed the border, aunts, uncles, older siblings,
grandparents, even parents. “They don’t know where their loved ones are who
they crossed the border with.”
Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University, described a chaotic scene. He saw children sleeping on concrete floors. A flu outbreak was made worse by the lack of soap. Another observer noted, “We saw many, many sick children. We immediately saw children who were coughing and had runny noses. They had mucus all over their shirts.” Attorneys who had come to fight for the rights of the children described seeing a “four-year-old with matted hair who had gone without a shower for days, and hungry, inconsolable children struggling to soothe one another. Some had been locked for three weeks inside the facility, where 15 children were sick with the flu and another 10 were in medical quarantine.”
Most Americans were horrified.
Yet, what really riled up Republicans was not the terrible conditions in which hundreds of elementary age and younger children were held. No. It made them angry when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the Trump administration was operating “concentration camps” for children. That hurt GOP feelings.
Meanwhile, desperate families continued to stream toward the
border. The president continued to stoke irrational fears. These were dangerous
criminals, he warned, hoping to invade our country.
Two of those dangerous criminals, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, 25, and his daughter, Angie Valeria, 23 months, never made it.
The Martínez family got as far
as the northern Mexican border city of Matamoros last weekend, where, according
to relatives, they hoped to cross into the United States and apply for asylum.
Told the bridge was closed,
however, they decided to ford the Rio Grande on Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Martínez went ahead with the
couple’s daughter, carrying her on his back, tucked under his T-shirt. His
wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, followed behind, riding on the back of a family
friend, she told Mexican officials.
As Mr. Martínez, carrying their
daughter, approached the opposite bank, he was visibly tiring in the rough
water, Ms. Ávalos told the authorities. Unnerved, she decided to swim back to
the Mexican side, but she saw her husband and daughter, close to the American
riverbank, sink into the water and get swept away.
One wonders, if one has any human feeling, what the last thoughts of this poor father and his little girl might have been.
We do know they weren’t coming to kill us. They were coming because
they wanted a chance for a better life.
Mr. Martinez and his poor daughter.
*
SEVENTEEN BILLIONAIRES, including Eli Broad, pen an open letter to all the presidential candidates. They ask that, if elected, they would impose “a moderate wealth tax on the fortunes of the richest one-tenth of the richest 1 percent of Americans – on us.”
These signatories join Warren Buffett, who advocated a
similar tax increase on billionaires in 2011, and Nick Hanauer, a
Seattle-based entrepreneur, who in 2014 penned an open letter to “My Fellow
Zillionaires.” He too said it was past time to raise taxes on people like him. As
The New York Times reports, “A recent analysis of a Federal
Reserve report found that over the last three decades, the wealthiest 1
percent of Americans saw their net worth grow by $21 trillion, while the wealth
of the bottom 50 percent fell by $900 billion.”
*
CARL CAMERON, one of the first hires at Fox News, and a
correspondent who covered politics at the channel for twenty-two years,
criticizes his old employer. “The idea of fair and balanced news appealed to me,” Cameron
explained, when he joined the network. “But over the years, the right-wing
hosts drowned out straight journalism [emphasis added] with partisan
misinformation.”
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Trump isn't moved by dead children.
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