NYT Editorial: Hundreds of Children Rot in the Desert. End Trump's Draconian Policies.

[riversedge]

Hundreds of Children Rot in the Desert. End Trump’s Draconian Policies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/opinion/migrant-children-tent-city-texas.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The administration created this crisis.

By The Editorial Board

Oct. 1, 2018



It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand that ripping children from their beds in the middle of the night, tearing them from anyone they’ve forged a connection with, and thrusting them into uncertainty could damage them.

Yet the crisis that has led federal immigration authorities to bus nearly 2,000 unaccompanied children (so far) from shelters around the country to a “tent city” in the desert town of Tornillo, Tex., is almost entirely of the American government’s own making..................

..................Instead, the Trump administration’s own draconian policies are to blame. Around the same time that it began separating immigrant children from their parents as they crossed into the United States, the Department of Homeland Security also established strict requirements for the relatives and friends who might care for these children while their cases are sorted out. Prospective sponsors are now required to submit fingerprints, and to share their information with federal immigration officers. Because most of them are undocumented immigrants themselves, they have been scared off by these requirements. And with good cause: Dozens of applicants who took the chance of applying to be sponsors have been arrested on immigration charges. As would-be sponsors shrink away, more children are stranded in federal custody.


Images of young children who were taken from their parents this summer prompted a widespread public outcry, leading the Trump White House and immigration officials to reverse course. The long-lasting trauma of extended detention, however, is harder to capture on film. Proponents of the current system insist that the restrictions on sponsors were put into place for the children’s protection. But it’s hard to see how any of the new policies could possibly do more good than harm.



Staff members at shelters cried as the children were removed, they told The Times, out of dread for what the children would now face. The tent city in Texas is not being held to any of the rules that group homes or foster care facilities are subject to. And those existing safeguards had already proved inadequate protection against physical abuse, sexual assault and emotional torment. The Department of Health and Human Services has instead offered a thin set of guidelines, but while the tents are air-conditioned, children will not have regular access to schooling or legal services. ........................

[Me.]

1. And Yet We Hear There Will Only Be A Modest Uptick In The Latino Vote

don't they get it, what is happening to these children?

[notdarkyet]

2. This is sick, sadistic and evil. There is no justification for any of this. It's about money

How much Out of the treasury has been drained . This is kidnapping and torture. There is no humanity about it.

[torius]

3. This is a human rights abomination

Never thought things like this could happen here. Not in 2018. But it is.

[Haggis for Breakfast]

4. THIS sickens me more than almost anything else they have done.

The United Nations Human Rights Council investigates human rights abuses all over the world. WHERE are they now ?

I was also thinking that maybe some good old fashioned civil disobedience is in order. If thousands of Americans went together to this place in the desert where these children are being held hostage and demanded to be heard, started capturing video of this, released it to the world, could we all do something to stop this atrocity ?

I did not wear the uniform to support this kind of heinous sadism. I believe that if any other country did this to American children, we would nuke them back to the pre-Cambrian era by noon the next day.

This is EVIL. It MUST stop. We MUST act. Have we lost all sense of shame ? Humanity ????