Trump Reaffirms “Zero Tolerance”...
for Brown-Skinned People

Pledges to Keep Refugee Children with Their Parents—IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

June 25, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Time magazine reports the U.S. Navy is planning to build “temporary and austere” tent cities on military bases capable of holding up to 100,000 immigrants. The shelters shown above are now being used to house migrant children in Tornillo and Brownsville in Texas. (Photo: Courtesy of the Administration for Children and Families at HHS.)

 

Imagine the terror of having your child—who you have risked all to protect—suddenly ripped away from you, and the agonizing fear as days, weeks, months go by without being able to talk to her, or even know where she is. Imagine being told by your captors that you may never see your child again. This has already happened to thousands of Latino immigrants on the U.S. southern border.

But wait... Didn’t Trump sign an executive order last Wednesday reversing the policy that has led to the abduction of around 2,300 children, declaring “We’re keeping families together and this will solve that problem”?

Isn’t this whole crisis over?

FUCK NO! Trump’s executive order was like someone on the defensive in a fight throwing dust in his opponent’s eyes to blind and confuse him, and then immediately slamming his head into a wall.

Yes, the order claims to be aimed at keeping families together, and in the signing ceremony Trump did a pathetic impersonation of a human being who “want[s] to be very compassionate.” This was enough to send some liberals into a victory dance, with media describing this as a major defeat for Trump, a “reversal” of his policy.

But at its core, the order reaffirms, as Trump put it, “zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally”—referring to the tens of thousands of desperate refugees who have been attempting to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum, and who have been illegally denied that right, unjustly imprisoned, and then had their children inhumanly abducted and taken to unknown locations around the U.S.

There is not a word in the order—and nothing substantial since—about reconnecting the abducted children with their parents.

The big “promise” in the order is that going forward, the government will put parents and children in prison together while they await being railroaded through bogus immigration courts and deported. This is the kind of concession talked about by Malcolm X—where a man has a four-inch knife in your back and then pulls back an inch and expects you to thank him. But even that promise is filled with loopholes; there is every reason to expect that the government will soon return to abducting children, and some evidence that it has already done so.

And what has gone down since Wednesday?

• Trump gave a hateful speech to parents of people who had been allegedly killed at the hands of undocumented immigrants (mostly in traffic accidents) and used these deaths to justify kidnapping and imprisoning thousands of innocent immigrant children.
• Fascist TV continued to promote Nazi dehumanization of immigrants, with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade declaring, “Like it or not, these are not our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like he’s doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.”
• Time magazine reported that over the next six months, the U.S. Navy is planning to build “temporary and austere” tent cities—that is, concentration camps—on military bases in isolated locations, capable of holding up to 100,000 immigrants.

Far from being “over,” the regime is driving forward with and escalating its Nazi-like attacks on immigrants, which are at the core of its whole project of fascist transformation of the U.S, and further hardening their base around sadistic racism. It is good and very important that masses of people have remained in the streets demanding this cease and have escalated their militancy around this—and the demonstrations called for June 30 must be massive as well.

There is no “stopping” this without driving the regime itself from power—that is the plain and simple truth. This is what Refuse Fascism is organizing to do—and many, many more people should go to RefuseFascism.org to find out about this and join in.

Abuse of Children Is Planted Deep Within This System—and That WHOLE System Must Be Overthrown

As many people have pointed out, the confinement of refugee children with their parents went on under Obama. And many people have drawn the links between the cruel separation of immigrant children today from their parents to the history of this country—heartlessly selling off Black children away from their parents during slavery times, cruelly kidnapping Native American children to boarding schools where they were taught that they and their people were “evil.”

And an article in the New York Times Friday pointed out that EVEN TODAY over 400,000 children within the U.S. are kept apart from their parents. Mass incarceration—including lengthy jail terms for nonviolent offenses—plus high bail, have put 400,000 single moms in prison or jail, and many have their children taken from them. Women who give birth while in jail generally are separated from their infants within a day or two of birth. And hundreds of thousands of children are taken by the state from their parents’ homes—some for reasons of abuse, but the majority for reasons of “neglect,” which, in the words of an expert cited by the Times, “often just looks like poverty.” Then add to that the 30,000 kids in juvenile jails, 60 percent for nonviolent offenses, some as petty as curfew violations!

In other words, this problem cuts deep into the system.

To get rid of this—to get to a world in which, to paraphrase Bob Avakian (BA), no more generations of our youth are condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality—this system must be OVERTHROWN. We need an actual revolution. This revolution is possible, on the basis of the work that’s been done by BA, and we are working to Prepare the Ground, Prepare the People, and Prepare the Vanguard—Get Ready for the Time When Millions Can Be Led to Go for Revolution, All-Out, With a Real Chance to Win.

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