We begin today’s roundup with this piece, written anonymously in The New York Times “because of the gang-related threats she and her family face in the United States and in El Salvador.” As Trump tries to shift his cruel policy from ripping children from their parents’ arms to extended family detention, the author reminds us that we must be vigilant in the fight to protect human rights and uphold our values:
[W]e were held for two months in a family immigration detention center in Artesia, N.M., run by a for-profit company.
The day-to-day conditions were horrible. The food was often expired, the milk was spoiled, and we weren’t provided with snacks for our children between meals. When we saved food for snacks, it was taken from us and thrown out because of concerns about rats in the dorms. Children went to bed hungry. And we could get water between meals only by asking the officers. Sometimes they wouldn’t bring any. The water we did have made us sick.
It was no place for human beings, let alone for families with small children.
When our children were sick, we waited days for medical attention. When one mother whose daughter had asthma informed the officers that her child needed medical care, she was told that she should have thought about that before she came to the United States. Another mother asked for medical assistance for her son but it never came. She was deported, and her son died just a few months later.
The Trump administration expects to detain so many families for the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry, they’re not just looking at private companies (which, by the way, have donated millions to GOP campaigns and committees). They’re building tent cities at military locations. James LaPorta and Spencer Ackerman at The Daily Beast give us the reaction of some in the military of Trump using the Department of Defense to implement his cruel agenda:
Active-duty and retired U.S. military officers and enlisted personnel are expressing a sense of moral emergency over the Defense Department setting up detention camps for undocumented immigrants on military bases.
“It smacks of totalitarianism,” said Steve Kleinman, a retired Air Force colonel and military intelligence officer.
Raf Noboa, an Iraq War veteran and former Army sergeant, said he was astounded by the “enormous moral offense” the camps represent and which the military will be ordered to support.
“America’s military once liberated people from concentration camps,” Noboa told The Daily Beast. “It beggars the mind and our morality that it might be used to secure them.”