Emergency!

1,500 Refugee Children Went Missing Under U.S. Custody—Now Trump/Pence Regime Is Ensuring Thousands More Suffer the Same Fate

May 28, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

The U.S. government has admitted that almost 1,500 refugee children in their custody are missing! Children who faced nightmarish poverty, domestic abuse, and violence by gangs, drug cartels, and police—all bearing the fingerprints of U.S. domination of their countries—and were forced to flee, by themselves, without their parents. Who trekked hundreds of miles north from Central America and Mexico to the U.S. border. Who were then taken by the U.S. government and supposedly placed with families or sponsors to ensure their health and safety—except now the U.S. has no idea where many of them are. And their parents have no idea that their children are now effectively disappeared.

The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement recently tried to find 7,835 children who arrived at the border and were declared “unaccompanied minors.” They were unable to locate 1,475. Some ended up with human traffickers. Two years ago, Associated Press investigators found over two dozen of these children under virtual slavery in Ohio in one of America’s largest egg-producing businesses, living in unimaginable squalor. (“Trafficked in America,” Frontline, April 24, 2018) Other children may have ended up with sexual abusers or may be on the streets. Some may be dead.

But the government isn’t organizing any search parties to find these children. This system took these children into its killing clutches and now claims it bears no responsibility, treating these precious, irreplaceable lives as just garbage to be disposed of!

And now, before our eyes, the Trump/Pence regime is taking draconian steps that will ensure that many more children are disappeared. They have declared that tearing every immigrant child away from her or his undocumented parents upon arrival is now official U.S. government policy. (See “Terror and Torture of Immigrant Children Now Official U.S. Policy”)

Listen to what John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, said as he defended the regime’s inhumane policy of criminalizing and imprisoning every refugee and stealing their children. “Don’t worry,” he said, because they “will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.”

“Or whatever”?! Like being “placed in homes” to be sexually assaulted, starved, or forced to work for little or no pay... or worse?

The Trump/Pence regime has taken this system’s crimes against immigrants to their fascist conclusion—ethnic genocide. Tearing every immigrant child away from her or his undocumented parents upon arrival is now a key link in the regime’s drive to clamp down with their fascist rule. The parallels to the program the Nazis implemented against Jews in Germany are chilling. Think about the 36-year-old Guatemalan woman in court in Arizona who asked when she could be reunited with her two children who’d been taken away when they crossed the border—and finding that neither the judge nor the prosecutor could answer her question. Or the Guatemalan man, deported after his 18-month-old child was taken away, who could not find his child.

¡Basta! No More! This fascist regime must be prevented from normalizing the ethnic cleansing of this country’s immigrants and committing other monstrous crimes against humanity. The current #WhereAreTheMissingChildren outrage across the media and social media about the tearing away and disappearing of refugee children is good. But it’s not enough!

Don’t waste time calling your senators or congresspeople, who will do nothing but tell you to cast a vote in November. Get into the streets now, and stay in the streets, until thousands have been brought forward, and then millions of people, demanding the Trump/Pence regime must go! And do it with your eyes and your energy on the prize—a radically different world where the efforts and creativity of children everywhere can finally be fully liberated!

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