By David Futrelle
Just a quick post with list of things you can do to fight Trump’s horrific policy of separating children from their parents at the border.
CALL YOUR REPS: Call your Senators and Congressional representative. Go to 5calls here (they have several scripts you can use and all the phone numbers you need) or call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121; they’ll connect you to the right people.
PREPARE FOR THE NATIONWIDE MOBILIZATION ON JUNE 30! Big demonstration planned for DC and in cities across the country, sponsored by Families Belong Together. Go here to find a demonstration near you.
FIND GROUPS DOING OTHER THINGS TO HELP. Here’s list of relevant groups and other ideas for activism on Slate.
@ Katiekitten420
I experience similar issues with my mental illness intersecting with despair from the news. I find it helpful to remind myself that I’m of no use to anyone when I’m panicked or frozen in despair. You are allowed to take a week or more off from the news (I even use website-blocking browser extensions). It doesn’t make you lazy or evil. You are having a normal response to sustained stress–high cortisol, adrenaline surges–compounded by your illness. As I’m sure you know, that shit is physically taxing in addition to mentally!
I’m an abuse survivor and intensely attuned to the abusive tactics of this administration. We are all victims of their gaslighting, and we all need breaks. Sometimes the best way to help others is to take care of yourself. What has helped me: taking a break (a week+), enjoying some of my favorite music/games/etc., reminding myself that even the most tireless activists are starting-and-stopping to recharge, and making a plan before jumping back in to limit fatigue and streamline actions. (For the last bit, I’ve found https://www.resistancemanual.org/Tools_of_Resistance helpful.)
Please take care. <3
Good luck to all my US friends fighting this awful policy. It brought tears to my eyes reading about it. How can any country that calls itself civilised separate little ones from their parents?
@Katie
You should do whatever self care you need. You can’t help others if you’re in a burnt-out bad place yourself, so if you aren’t in good emotional shape you should take a step back.TBH I have been feeling much the same recently.
@everyone else – take care of yourselves as well.
X
For anyone arguing against others who refuse to acknowledge possible hitler-mussolini-fascist parallels, one thing stands out as an exclusively American shame. Internment of Japanese citizens and others during WW2.
If you look at those ghastly tent encampments now being set up (to accommodate up to 4000 children they tell us!), the parallel starts to look
a) very American
b) beyond shameful.
Who’d have thunk you wouldn’t need to stretch a Hitler comparison, there’s a ready-made, homegrown, horror all of your own.
I know a man who was interred along with his family during WWII. Called him “Uncle” growing up because he was my father’s childhood best friend. They were friends right up ’til my father’s death last year.
He voted for Trump. I have no idea what I’d say to him.
One I don’t see getting out to the wider public, the adoptee community is deeply concerned that these children are going to end up adopted out. After all, if they’re “unaccompanied”, there’s no reason to give them back to parents who “let” them be alone in a foreign country. And now only has Bethany Children’s Services, long a purveyor of children for sale – I mean adoption- has already gotten involved there are many parents who have no idea where their children are, despite the fact said parents have either been deported or released awaiting their asylum hearings.
Possible (relatively) good news – I heard on the radio news this morning that the Repubs may have been shamed into sponsoring urgent legislation to end the separation policy.
When did it dawn on them that ICE had become the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ?
@Mildlymagnificent
Or indeed the reservation system, one of the things Hitler explicitly modeled his own genocidal progammes on.
It’s really interesting to see the different responses that Republicans have to this story blowing up:
1. “Our actions make us look cartoonishly evil, which is bad because we shouldn’t actually be carrying out the policies that we promise to our base.”
2. “Our actions make us look cartoonishly evil, which is bad because we want to carry out these policies but don’t want people to pay attention to them.”
3. “Our actions make us look cartoonishly evil, which is good because we finally don’t look like a bunch of cucks.”
I’m starting to get worried that if there by some miracle a decent legislative solution to the family separation policy does get passed with a veto proof majority, everyone will just forget about the other ways the Trump administration is going after immigrants.
It’s not just family separation that’s the issue. Everyone has forgotten that it was announced that they’ll start taking back the citizenships and deporting any naturalized citizen suspected of fraud. Fraud is not defined clearly, so this opens up the possibility that a minor clerical will be cause enough. There’s also the fact that there’s already been several instances of ICE arresting and detaining people who are here legally. We can’t forget that the goal of the administration is to make just being an immigrant illegal. We also can’t forget that mass deportation and mass detention is cost prohibitive. If we’re doing comparisons to the Holocaust, the extermination was done when it was too expensive to keep housing, feeding and guarding all their prisoners. The genocide risk does not automatically go down if we just switch to detaining entire families of asylum seekers with no intention of ever processing them and letting them go.
Trump set it himself yesterday. He doesn’t want more judges because he doesn’t want immigrants to “infest” the country at all. He means that.
God help America. We had a similar scandal in the UK with established naturalized citizens being deported (seems to have cooled off a bit since it came to light and a Home Secretary with an immigrant background was appointed.)
We’ve already shamefully beaten you to it about kicking out highly skilled immigrants over minor tax return errors using legislation intended for use against terror suspects.
Way to go. Vote for a conservative – style government to see xenophobia enacted.
There’s the human misery it causes as a prime reason to despise it, not to mention sacrificing national competitiveness on the same altar.
Not true. Canada did this too. In fact, the whole “separating children from their parents” thing was exactly what Canada’s government did to the aboriginal peoples for more than three decades as a result of the residential school policy. The residential school completely destroyed their community and familial bonds, then when they grew up and had kids of their own, those kids suffered the same neglect and abuse that they suffered and the government put them into foster care in the infamous Sixties Scoop (which actually lasted into the 80s). Canada has since apologized, but has not taken nearly the necessary steps to remedy the ills of the past.
Make no mistake, the racist governments of both nations want to break these people on a fundamental level. They cannot be allowed to succeed in that goal.
Katamount : I think he or she mean by that that the internment camps are 100% american made, not that the concept of internment is reserved to America.
For what it’s worse, France isn’t *terribly* better than the US. I mean, we aren’t doing anything truly murderous yet, but we are on the fence since a lot of time.
Yeah, I agree.
“You wanted us to stop putting children alone in cages? Fine. We’ll put their families in there with them. Next issue.”
In a way, by focusing on the separation of children from their families rather than on the basical inhumanity of America’s refugee policy (an inhumanity shared with a sadly large number of Western countries) the debate has fundamentally missed the point, and has passed over a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be passed over, and has given the White House an easy escape hatch.
Then again, I have the worrying feeling that the other issues that you highlight will not have the same public backlash, and may in fact be supported by a depressingly large number of people.
As my brother-in-law says, “there’s always some asshole.” 😛
Canada is not lily-white in this regard, that’s for sure. While we’re distracted by what’s going on in the US let’s make sure the same crap isn’t (still) happening here.
Thank you, David!
Australia had its own Stolen Generation(s) in our own shameful treatment of indigenous people as well as stealing land and forcing people onto lands that weren’t theirs. Come to think of it, we did a pretty outstanding (horrible, brutal) job of interning people of German descent during WW1 in pretty ghastly conditions at Port Adelaide.
But now, seeing those tents going up in Texas by the border … the Japanese internment analogy seems eerily apt.
Breaking news:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/20/homeland-security-drafts-plan-to-end-family-separation.html
@Victorious Parasol Some good news, yet still we must keep an eye out as to how ICE and the GOP will circumvent this. Because they will try.
Like I was saying
https://twitter.com/joshuamanning23/status/1009482831519629312
They’ll simply be detaining them together at first, charging the parents, and taking the kids away anyway.
I can’t even bring myself to watch MSNBC right now because I fear they will be celebrating this as a fix, giving Trump credit for doing the right thing and it will take several weeks for them to notice this executive order is not adequate. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval ratings will go up because he “fixed” the problem that he created.
:O
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/6/20/1773663/-Flight-Attendants-worry-they-ve-become-the-crews-on-Reichsbahn-trains-heading-East-in-1942
I’ve talked about this elsewhere on the net, but I don’t think I’ve brought it up here.
Years ago, I was the work-study student (read: general dogsbody) for a professor of German at my college. He was a sweet man, very soft-spoken and gentle … and I learned later that he had been involved in the liberation of the camps, as a military translator. His area of scholastic expertise involved Holocaust deniers, because he believed he needed to stand up to such (obscenity deleted) and say, “No, the Shoah happened. I was there. I saw the results.”
He was so proud and happy when his son was tasked with guarding Rudolf Hess when that monster was still alive. He fought against Nazis and their heirs all his life.
I hope he taught me enough.
So, it’s really important not to treat this as a victory.
1. Illegal border crossing went from a civil to a criminal infraction. So families can still be separated en masse if the government prosecutes en masse.
2. There’s no reunification plan. If the children already taken are adopted out, and it looks like they will be, this is according to the UN charter genocide if the intent is determined to be genocidal, and given Trump’s language on immigrants (animals, infest) along with the plan to strip citizenships and commit mass deportations I think it is.
http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.html
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
3. The EO makes clear that the intent is to set up indefinite family detention camps. A court has ruled that children cannot be detained indefinitely, so Trump will give us a false choice. Either his now right wing judge packed courts have to overturn this ruling or he has to prosecute all the adults in the camps so he can take the kids out and give them to US government to foster/adopt out/possibly sell to traffickers.
4. The family gulags will now be run by the DHS. It’s now a military operation, not a civilian one. Effectively, immigrants are now enemy combatants. This provides a handy justification for killing them under the thinnest of pretenses. This in turn provides a justification for an extermination policy at a greater date.
The problem isn’t that Trump created a problem so he could take credit for the solution, as many have suggested. The problem is that he is engineering a phony solution to cover up and distract from his plans to carry out a more sinister policy. Trump himself is admitting this
https://twitter.com/Shakestweetz/status/1009518687093747712
Although I’ve disagreed with Melissa McEwan here and there in the past, she’s really done an excellent job compiling Trump’s parade of horrors and unfortunately, her usually dire predictions regarding his future behavior has tended to come true. I recommend either reading her blog or following her Twitter.
Useful post here:
https://www.facebook.com/MIchelle.Martin15/posts/1852738241454566
Rallying cry:
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/20/621798823/speaker-ryan-plans-immigration-votes-amid-doubts-that-bills-can-pass It’s about Trump’s new executive order, then about the bills.
Are the protests all still on? The document sounds like they’re just going to turn the kid-centration camps into full-fledged concentration camps:
“…also the policy of this Administration to maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”