Terror and Torture of Immigrant Children Now Official U.S. Policy

May 14, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Oozing with the white-supremacist self-righteousness he’s become known for, Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Monday, May 7 that tearing every immigrant child away from their undocumented parents upon capture after crossing the border is now U.S. government policy. This makes it absolutely clear: the terrorizing, torturing, and permanently harming immigrant children and their parents is now a cornerstone of Amerikkkan policy toward immigrants and refugees at the Southwest border.

Sessions justified this crime against humanity by branding as “smugglers” undocumented immigrant parents—including some political asylum seekers—who come into the U.S. with children searching for a better life: “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.” The reality—despite the lies spewed by Sessions, Trump, and the rest of the fascist cabal—is that there is nothing illegal about people, who are fleeing situations endangering their lives, to cross borders in search of asylum.

Sessions also announced that the Justice Dept. will prosecute as many captured border crossers as possible—“until we get to 100 percent.” This means that all border crossers, including those seeking asylum, now face up to 6 months in prison if caught. He declared that he has “sent 35 prosecutors to the Southwest and moved 18 immigration judges to the border” to carry out this threat.

Continuing with the lies, Sessions claimed, “Today we’re here to send a message to the world that we are not going to let the country be overwhelmed. People are not going to caravan or otherwise stampede our border.” The U.S. is being “overwhelmed” by people who are on a “stampede” across the border? This is complete bullshit—and these fascists know it. The latest statistics announced just 5 months ago indicate that arrests of people trying to cross without documents into the U.S. from Mexico are at their lowest levels since 1971. But “stampede” and “overwhelmed” fit the Trump/Pence regime’s aim of fanning xenophobic (anti-foreigner) poison to justify ramping up fascist anti-immigrant measures and militarization of the border.

The few hundred immigrant refugees who recently reached the U.S. border as part of the Caravan that Sessions slandered are families fleeing U.S.-created violence, poverty and imminent danger in Central America. Nearly 80% of the refugees at the start of the Caravan were Hondurans, escaping the upheavals that followed yet another fraudulent “election” supported by the U.S. to put in a pro-American puppet. To threaten refugees with arrest, imprisonment, and separation of families is itself a violation of both U.S. and international law. But to this regime, neither truth nor the law are going to get in the way of their fascist anti-immigrant program.

Sessions had this outrageous explanation for why so many people are risking their lives on a journey seeking asylum: “We also have dirty immigration lawyers who are encouraging their otherwise unlawfully present clients to make false claims of asylum providing them with the magic words needed to trigger the credible fear process.” This is another element of the new fascist norms—declaring that those who try to use the law to oppose the criminal actions of this fascist regime will be considered enemies of the state.

What fucking sewer did this American Nazi and his cohorts crawl out of?

It is the crimes of U.S. imperialism and their continuing consequences that have made the countries of the Northern Triangle—Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—unlivable for tens of millions of people. Decades and decades of direct and indirect U.S. military violence and genocidal killing; the training, arming, and directing of death squads; the political repression and murder of political forces representing any challenge to the brutal domination and exploitation by U.S. imperialism—all this and more is what is driving people to risk the dangers and hardships of the 2,000-mile journey to the U.S. border.¹

“America number 1” has long been the worldview of those who rule this country—an outlook in the service of their capitalist-imperialist system. And now a fascist regime has come to power to take this to new extreme levels, working to consolidate a rule of unapologetic white supremacy and male supremacy, open hatred for immigrants, and hyper-aggressive imperialist gangsterism around the world.

The inhumanity of the Trump/Pence regime is intolerable—it concentrates what the system of U.S. capitalism-imperialism has always been and meant for billions around the world. They are threatening the whole planet, and everyone on it. Following in the footsteps of Hitler’s demonization of and persecution of the Jews and other groups, this regime has singled out immigrants as the “internal enemy” for their followers to target and attack—and are aiming to get greater numbers of “good Americans” to be silent and go along with these horrors. Enough! Not one day more can this regime, and this system, be tolerated!

1. For background on this, see American Crime series Case #95: Reagan's Butcher Carries Out Genocide in Guatemala; Case #91: School of the Americas—Training Ground for Mass Murderers and Torturers, 1946-Present; Case #79: Ronald Reagan’s Honduras—The Atrocities of “Battalion 316”; Case #75: Obama, Clinton and the 2009 Military Coup in Honduras.  [back]

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