A consequence of Trump's zero tolerance policy toward migrants illegally crossing our southern border has been the forced separation of children from their parents seeking asylum. This has been going on for over a month but the story gained national attention as the number of separations increased. Over the weekend, it has become a political firestorm when Trump falsely blamed the Democrats for the separation policy and tried to use the situation as leverage to pass his immigration bill.
Here are videos about the how the children are being treated and the political backlash. This is a developing story so I expect more in the next two two before our meeting:
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Here are the other videos shown at the meeting:
Here are the other videos shown at the meeting:
- An immigration system totally overwhelmed
- Trump makes abrupt about-face on family separation
- Trump's Executive Order to Undo an Executive Failure
Beyond the immediate questions about families and children entering the United States without proper documentation are the deeper issues that have led us to this latest crisis. These issues are not for the Border Patrol or ICE, or even politicians alone to address, but if they expect anything other than Band-Aid solutions, the powers-that-be may want to look at historical, political, racial, and economic factors that underlie the “immigration problem.” The southern US border is one of the few places in the world where so much poverty and underdevelopment share a border with so much wealth and development. As such, it shines a light on what happens when the very wealthy manipulate poor economies to serve their wealth, and when they’ve done so for more than a hundred years.
ReplyDeleteIn 1954, a CIA-backed coup (in response to the government’s expropriation of United Fruit Company lands) ousted the elected president of Guatemala and replaced him with a military junta, triggering a decades-long civil war. Per Noam Chomsky, with US support, Rios Montt slaughtered tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Indians in the highlands, while countless others were tortured and raped. Large regions were decimated. And he “was lauded by Reagan as a man totally dedicated to democracy.” And per Steven Kinzer in The New York Review (Dec. 5, 2013), “Guatemala is no longer at war, but its democracy is one of the weakest in the hemisphere. Its politics is corrupt. The range of choices at election time is narrow, and Congress is splintered and frozen into immobility. Drug gangs have penetrated government. Violence is endemic. Entire populations of indigenous people are still suffering from the effects of political violence. Millions subsist in acute poverty.”
The US military invaded Nicaragua numerous times in the early 20th century and occupied it for twenty years in the service of US banking interests. We then backed the notorious Somozas and of course later sold arms to Iran to avert Congressional restrictions on supplying support to the Contras, who by most accounts brutalized the civilian population.
In El Salvador, Bishop Oscar Romero was murdered in 1980, triggering a 12-year civil war in which some 70,000 Salvadorans were killed. According to Alma Guillermoprieto writing in The New York Review, (May 27, 2010), “During the presidency of General Arturo Molina (1972-1977), the army and security forces were essentially transformed into death squads: Romero watched in horror as campesinos in his parish were displaced, threatened, terrorized, and increasingly shot, stabbed, or hacked to death by underfed, underage soldiers wielding machetes against their own kind.”
And then there’s “Pobre Mexico, tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos,” Porfirio Diaz. (“So far from God, so close to the United States.”) His observation of course was informed by the fact that in the 19th century the US decided it wanted a large parcel of Mexican land and took it. “’I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United Sates on Mexico,’ said Ulysses S. Grant in 1879, more than thirty years after he had fought in that war as a young lieutenant. As he was dying of cancer in 1885, Grant reasserted that the American war against Mexico was ‘one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation,’ [and] . . . it was a war of choice, not of necessity . . .” (James McPherson, The New York Review Feb. 7, 2013). And that was just the beginning.
President Trump of course seems little concerned with any of this history and its impact on the people of Mexico and Central America today. He just needs to maintain control of the narrative and keep the series going. Most of all, he wants us to stay tuned to his show, and as long as he can control the pacing and the storyline (It’s the Democrats fault”), nothing else matters.