AS HE PLAYS HIS POLITICAL GAMES WITH IMMIGRATION, DONALD TRUMP DOESN'T CARE ABOUT MIGRANT CHILDREN CRYING, AS LONG AS HE CAN BUILD HIS WALL

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The Controversy is including - at the bottom of this column - links to my first and second editorials in this series of three commentaries that focus on the separation of migrant children from their parents.  If you have not had the opportunity to read chapters one and two, please do so by clicking on the links below.    

     Does Donald Trump have a heart beating in his chest?  Apparently not.

     How can Trump get any restful shuteye knowing that every night migrant children are presumably crying themselves to sleep because they are not with their mommies and daddies?  I have a feeling that Trump slumbers quite peacefully.

     Does it not bother Trump in the least that little boys and little girls are grief-stricken because they not only are missing their parents, but they don't know where they were taken?  Some of these kids are around the age of Trump's own son, Barron...while some are not too much younger... and others are only a few years older.  Yet, I'm sure they are all feeling the excruciating pain and the unfathomable sadness of being separated from the parents they love.  How many more tears have to be shed?  It's become obvious to me that Donald Trump doesn't care.  (Note: After this column was published, it was reported that although the mother of the Honduran child pictured above was patted down by a Border Patrol agent, the father of the crying girl told The Washington Post that the child was never separated from her mother. Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John Moore says after he took the picture, the little girl's mother picked her up and they drove off in a van.  However, the tears of the child are still real...and she represents the feelings of nearly seven out of every ten Americans).

     Under pressure by two-thirds of the country - according to a recent CBS News poll that indicates that 67 percent of Americans opposed Donald Trump's policy to separate migrant children from their parents - Trump, on Wednesday, June 20th, 2018, signed an executive order that should put a stop to any future migrant children being split up from their parents.  Those adults - who cross the border illegally with their kids - will still be prosecuted, but their children will stay with them.  They will live together as a family in a detention center while they wait for a judge to hear their case.  But Trump's new executive order will not benefit - one iota - the children who are already detained and divided from their moms and dads.  That document is worth nothing more than used toilet paper for those kids, because apparently, nobody seems to know how to find...ALL the parents...of ALL the migrant children...or how to reconnect those families.

     It's heartbreaking to think...that everyday...and for the unforeseeable future...after traumatic nighttime and overnight hours...thousands of migrant children - from newborn babies to teenagers - are waking up the next morning...remembering how they were pulled from the arms of their mothers and fathers at the U.S./Mexico border...and frightened that they may never see their parents again.  One government official has advised us that some of these children - if not all of them - who are currently detained...may never be reunited with their moms and dads again.

     The question to ask now is...how will Donald Trump and the people of his administration reassemble these family units? After all...the babies can't talk. And other children - who are so very young - aren't likely to know the addresses of the last places they called home.  Furthermore, these kids - most of whom are extremely poor - probably didn't have cell phones on their person when they were forcibly taken by scary-looking border patrol cops wearing uniforms and carrying guns, who later incarcerated them in nothing more than what I call...metal "kiddie crates."  Through photographs, we have witnessed these youngsters...huddled together in cages, as if they were wild animals.  Even if their parents could have afforded cell phones, those migrant adults who were arrested at the border are currently in federal jails...and undoubtedly their possessions were confiscated from them.  However, let's presume that some of those parents did have cell phones.  If they are - at some point - deported back to their home countries...babies and toddlers won't know the numbers to call their parents' phones.

     NBC News reported on June 22nd that a senior Homeland Security official has told "The Peacock Network" that five-hundred migrant children have been returned to their parents since May 7th.  One Guatemalan woman was able to be reunited with her 7-year old son, but only after she filed a lawsuit against the United States government. Also on June 22nd, girls were finally seen by reporters at a detention center in south Florida, near Miami.  It's the first time anyone has seen young female migrants who were separated from their parents.  The Homestead Florida Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children is the same facility where U.S. Senator Bill Nelson and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz - both Democrats from "The Sunshine State" - were refused entrance on June 19th.  Nelson accused the Trump administration of a "cover-up" after he and Wasserman Schultz were denied the chance to check out the facility so they could survey conditions where migrant teenage children - both boys and girls - are being held.

     At last count, the federal government says about 2,300 children have been separated from their parents since Donald Trump and U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions created their "zero tolerance policy" on May 7th. Subsequently, a group of state attorneys general announced on June 21st that they have plans to file a lawsuit against the Department of Justice.  This coalition of eleven chief law enforcement officers from California, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Pennsylvania and the state of Washington are furious over Trump's "cruel and unlawful" policy, which - according to a statement from Xavier Becerra violated the fundamental due process of parents to remain with their underage sons and daughters.  The California AG's press release explains..."We are filing this lawsuit  because ripping children from their parents is unlawful, wrong, and heartless."  "A political stunt" is what Becerra is labeling Trump's "empty and meaningless order that claims to take back policies that he put in place himself."  Becerra argues Trump's policy could "have devastating consequences on children's health and well-being."  Meanwhile, Washington attorney general Bob Ferguson - who leads the lawsuit - says Trump's policy is "rogue, cruel, and unconstitutional."

     To top off the delusional mind of Donald Trump and those of his disgusting cronies...a former U.S. Department of Agriculture facility is being considered as a possible site to house unaccompanied migrant children.  However, this location - in Kelso, Arkansas - is less than two miles from a former internment camp in the town of Rohwer where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II. Historians have characterized those internment camps in terms ranging from disgraceful to sinful...which is much the way that the lodging for the migrant children is being portrayed.  About those accommodations where the kids are being kept, former First Lady Laura Bush recently wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post.  "These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history." Yet Donald Trump not only wants to establish a guarded "tent city" for migrant kids - one of several such makeshift housing - but this particular one would be on a flood plain in rural Arkansas.  Besides that...the setting is a chilling reminder of a despicable decision that was made more than three-quarters of a century ago...when innocent American citizens were detained...only because of their Japanese heritage.  The Commission on Wartime Relocation of Civilians says the internment camps "resulted more from racism than any security risk posed by Japanese-Americans" following Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7th, 1941.

     This is the third of my trilogy of columns following Donald Trump's immoral, inhumane, and insane policy.  It is perhaps the most disturbingly brutal act that has been deliberately ordered by an American president in my lifetime.  Separating children from their parents and then locking them up in cages is barbaric behavior by a wicked and reckless monster who is totally unfit to serve as president of the United States.  Donald Trump's unconscionable conduct has once again embarrassed our country in a scandal that is likely to define his presidency.  Thousands of children - infants and toddlers, tweens and teens - were stolen from the arms of their mothers and fathers in a gruesome demonstration that should be condemned by every single decent American.  Unfortunately, I have discovered over the last three years - since Trump became a presidential candidate and later The Oval Office occupant - that a large percentage of Americans are not decent.  In fact, I am appalled at those individuals who - as Trump cheerleaders - support the vile practices of an evil and detestable beast.  It boggles my mind that so many people - one-third of our country, according to the aforementioned CBS News poll - can still remain in Trump's corner when he allowed babies to be caged.  And for the attorney general and the secretary of Homeland Security to not only stand by the commander-in-chief while he performed in such a reprehensible manner, but for this pair of "Trump trolls" to defend the policy and lie about it - as Trump did - is contemptible.  Therefore, Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Nielsen are complicit in a decision that makes them just as bad as their boss. As for the wimpish vice president...Mike Pence is no better than Trump, Sessions and Nielsen.  Pence totally ignored protesters when he delivered a speech on tax reform in Columbus, Ohio on June 15th.  Instead of stepping up to the plate to prove that his soul is pure, Pence merely talked over the people who were heckling him.  "Why are you ripping children from their families?" one person shouted.  But Pence continued with his prepared remarks as if the protesters were not even in the room. He showed no compassion towards someone who was - in essence - speaking for two-thirds of our nation.

     Donald Trump's executive order, as a whole, is a sham.  It does absolutely nothing to make right what Trump did wrong with the families that have already been torn apart.  As for children who do somehow become reunited with their mothers and fathers, Trump's horrendous plan to indefinitely lock them up in detention facilities - which are tantamount to World War II internment camps - is an abomination that should not be accepted by Congress and the American people.

     If ever there was a crisis, "I alone can fix it" is what Trump told Republicans at their 2016 convention in Cleveland, Ohio. Instead, he wants to use crying babies and distressful older children as hostages and bargaining chips in an effort to persuade Congress to build a xenophobic and racist wall on the U.S./Mexico border.

     Trump blamed Democrats for the separation of migrant children from their parents.  That was a lie.  And he continues to not take responsibility for our country's chaos with the issue of immigration.  However, if Trump would stop spewing his venomous rhetoric about a wall - a structure that will never be built - then perhaps a compromise agreement could be reached by Democrats and Republicans, so that reasonable immigration legislation can be passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

     Let us remember that the vast majority of migrants who have illegally crossed the border in to America have done so to find better lives for their children and themselves.  Families have traveled far distances by foot - from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico - to escape the atrocious violence and the dreadful poverty that ravages their nations.  A great amount of these men and women, boys and girls, have walked hundreds - and in some cases, thousands of miles - to seek safety in what Francis Scott Key described in The Star Spangled Banner as "the land of the free and the home of the brave."  Donald Trump wants all Americans to respect our National Anthem and to "stand proudly" for it.  What a shame that he - along with certain members of his administration - are not representing Mr. Key's words with the honor and integrity that those lyrics deserve.

     And that's The Controversy for today.

     I'm Gary B. Duglin.

     "We'll talk again."

Links to first and second editorials in this series:  

http://www.thecontroversy.net/2018/06/separating-migrant-children-from.html and http://www.thecontroversy.net/2018/06/donald-trump-doesnt-give-damn-that.html

The Controversy is a publication of GBD Productions.  Founder and Editor-In-Chief of The Controversy is Gary B. Duglin.

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Photo credits:  John Moore/Getty Images (Little migrant girl crying), Getty Images (Little migrant boy with sad face), United States Customs and Border Protection and NBC News (Migrants in cage), The Associated Press (Senator Bill Nelson and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz), Rich Pedroncelli/The Associated Press (California Attorney General Xavier Becerra), Todd Heisler/The New York Times (Migrant boys held) CNBC (Donald Trump #1), and The Chicago Tribune (Donald Trump #2)

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