Today is a day of protest. People will be rallying to let our congressional representatives know the border camps must be shut down — the Morris event will be at 5:30 today, outside the library.
This is a crisis. The comparison to Nazis has never been more appropriate — the border patrol is packed with the worst people, bigots who are actively dehumanizing immigrants and subjecting them to horrendous conditions.
This secret Facebook group for border patrol members, “I am 10-15”, that has been pumping out sewage for years is revealing — imagine if the conversations of Nazi prison camp guards had been preserved for posterity, I’m sure they’d sound just like this.
Recent posts shared with ProPublica include a meme using graphic language to mock CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s sexual orientation and a comment that referred to soccer star Megan Rapinoe as a man. A separate thread made fun of a video of a migrant man trying to carry a child through a rushing river in a plastic bag.
One poster wrote, “At least it’s already in a trash bag.”
Another wrote, “Sous-vide? Lol,” referring to a method of cooking in a bag.
That’s a child they are laughing at.
Several of our representatives went on a tour of the “detention facilities” (the nicest euphemism anyone can come up with for these hell-holes), and it’s a horror show.
California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu also spoke of CBP’s unwillingness to let the lawmakers see the whole facility — and even accused the officers of cleaning up before the group arrived at one of the stations.
“CBP didn’t want us to talk to them. They actually prohibited us from doing it, but we went ahead and did it anyway,” she said of the El Paso station. “There were 3 cells of about 15 women each, and the tears were streaming down their faces as they talked about their children being separated from them, the lack of running water, the fact that they had been there for over 50 days and had no idea when they were going to leave.”
The conditions described by Kennedy, Ocasio-Cortez, and other politicians corroborate what attorneys — and migrants themselves — have said Border Patrol stations are like. On Monday, the Associated Press obtained footage of an interview with a 12-year-old girl who had been held at the Clint, Texas station. The girl, who was separated from her aunt at the border, said she and the other children were “treated badly,” forced to sleep on the floor, and were barely given food.
That the jailers prohibited anyone from recording, or even talking with the prisoners, says it all. They know they’re doing evil, and that they’re being dragged into the light, and they don’t like it.
Fire them all. Shut the camps down. Let the people go free and reunite the broken families.
If you ever put them on trail, I’m sure they will claim only to be following orders….
Except that now we have a record on FaceBook of their voluntarily expressed attitudes.
And the people who were giving them those orders will gleefully throw them under the bus to avoid being charged with anything themselves.
This is an old story but one of the most chilling things I have ever heard about: “Mexican teenager dies after drinking liquid meth in front of smiling US border officers” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/mexican-teenager-crystal-meth-death-us-border-officers-cruz-velazquez-apple-juice-cctv-footage-a7868411.html
Who knows how representative that is of border guards, but it does seem like we have people in this position who have dehumanized the people in their charge. The fact that this was not a much bigger scandal shows that we as a nation have been going along with it.
“Fire them all. Shut the camps down. Let the people go free and reunite the broken families.”
That’s a good start, but it needs to be followed with prosecutions for crimes against humanity. Some very public prosecutions with meaningful penalties, and not just for the low-level flunkies.
Call them Trump Jails. Make the bastard own them.
Anything that gives the power of life and death to citizens is going to be a scum magnet. Border patrol, cops, whatever.
None within 50 miles, but makes some small sense given the trumpkin chucklefuck gerrymandered onto us as rep sent out an email yesterday blaming the crisis on Dems for not providing additional funding. I doubt even death will cure that shitstain of his inhumanity.
You’d think that some clever representative could have snuck a camera into the camps with them? You can even find spy cameras in the shape of eyeglasses and wristwatches on Amazon.
Abu Ghraib all over again.
When that scandal hit, an ‘investigation’ was performed that was not permitted to go up the chain of command beyond enlisted folks. Not surprisingly only low level crimes were found. Then Obama came along and swept all the issues regarding torture under the rug and refused to look at it. So now we have a known torturer/criminal in charge of our CIA and won’t even investigate this most recent act of mass torture and inhumanity along the border. Will Democrats have the will to force accountability? They have the power. Will they use it? or are they too afraid of losing votes? What does that say about us?
I wish I were being cynical, but I’ve watched the corrupt Democratic leadership for too long pretending to be the “opposition” to the Fascist/Republican Party. I’m being a strict realist.
It’s all a game at the top. The Democrats in the House could have subpoenaed the top people responsible for the hellholes as soon as the facts came out. In fact, the House Dems could have investigated a long time ago. Why don’t they just subpoena hundreds of the concentration camp inmates – making sure money is provided to give them good clothes, food and transportation – and have them describe those hellholes? (I just read another stupid newspaper columnist trying to argue the concentration camps aren’t real concentration camps because the inmates are not being shot or electrocuted or thrown into gas chambers or something like that, which is why I’m kind of bitter right now.)
For that matter, subpoena the kids, require the gestapo thugs to let the Dems immediately hold hearings in the concentration camp cages, in front of cameras, to show the public just how bad the conditions are, then take all the kids to a good hotel, restaurant, clothing stores, etc., using that $775 per inmate per day fee the corporate thugs are being paid to run these hellholes. I wish I had $775 every day from the government when I travel.
I’ll stop here because I’ll keep getting angrier. I’ll just say I can’t say which party is more evil – the GOP is openly evil, but the Dem leadership is just as bad, it just pretends it’s not. This is why I hated Obama (I pegged him as a Rethug in 2008, which is why I could not vote for him) as much as Bush the Younger Fascist. Most of the Pseudo-Democrats running for the nomination are Rethugs.
Kindly remember to call them CONCENTRATION camps. In addition to being the wholly appropriate label, that’s a term with a specific weight in our culture, as evidenced by the right wing screaming “no they aren’t!” at the top of their lungs and desperately quibbling over definitions. We correctly associate people who build such things with evil and the wrong side of history.
It absolutely matters what terms are used. The right understands this; we need to understand it too.
Aha! Looks like Joaquin Castro DID sneak a camera in! Clever fellow!
As a side issue, I’m slightly miffed that somehow I didn’t find out about these protests until the one near me was over; I would have gone had I known. Apparently, there was a very short run-up — the site for them over at CommonDreams says were apparently planned on the 29th, so only 4 days to spread the word — but somehow no information channel I watch actively mentioned them until today, when I left the house without looking at the computer and then was away until several hours too late, and then suddenly there were notices everywhere.
#trumpjails
Thats a meme. I can’t find a good way to include concentration camp or death camp in that. Trump gulag?
Of course we fucking Australians are responsible for exactly the same sort of thing on Naru.