Out of the Woods

Shame! Shame!

On the Fourth of July we celebrated the United States of America and glorified our democracy.

Two days later the New York Times reported on a group of lawyers visiting the Clint, TX detention facility where our government, just raucously celebrated, detains about 300 children ranging in age from 5 months to 17 years. Yes, you read that right-- FIVE months old. Surely an infant did not come to the US border without a parent or some other adult who brought that child. But now this infant is on its own. The older children, themselves seriously distressed, are tasked with taking care of the little ones.

I hold my seven month old grandson and think about this story. I know how utterly dependent infants are. I can imagine those children wailing in their misery and I weep.

Among these children are a number of teen mothers who gave birth very recently. All the children are filthy. Since crossing the border they have not been able to wash. They do not have water to wash, let alone soap or showers. They do not have toothbrushes or a change of clean clothes. The babies and infants do not have diapers. The government—OUR government—has argued in court that it has no obligations to allow the children to wash themselves or the clothes they have been wearing since coming into the country, often weeks ago. The government does not believe that it has obligations to acknowledge the immigrants’ most elementary dignity.

In El Paso, TX. “Border Patrol agents told us some of the detainees had been held in standing-room-only conditions for days or weeks,” the inspector general’s office said in its report, which noted that some detainees were observed standing on toilets in the cells “to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to the toilets.” It is difficult not to think of Jews packed into box cars, standing room only, on the transport to extermination camps in the East.

One of the lawyers visiting the Clint, TX. Reported “ “So many children are sick, they have the flu, and they’re not being properly treated.” The same reports from different detention sites, are available on the websites of the American Civil Liberties Union, the American friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee and other non-profit organizations.

Having been a child refugee myself, these reports distressed me deeply. I began to think that perhaps there would be a way of fostering or adopting one of these unfortunate children in order to save at least one child. But all I found out was that the government cruelty extended also to fostering and adoption. It turns out that the government did send some of the children they had taken from families at the border to the largest adoption agency run by very right-wing evangelical organizations. The Border Patrol meanwhile was making no efforts to find the families whose children they had taken away. But videos of children being taken from their parents to be given out to adoption were being shown to refugees to make them “behave.” One woman was persuaded to retract her application for asylum by threatening to give her children out to adoption. Adoption has become a tool for suppressing refugees.

All of this happens in the context of steeply restricted availability of children ready to be adopted. A few years ago, American parents looking for children to adopt had children available from many foreign country such as Russia or China. Both of these countries have since prohibited foreign adoptions. So have many other countries. Fewer children are available for adoption in the US today. Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, was calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.”

What can we do? The key lesson is that we are completely powerless although we are living in a democracy. Websites promising to tell us how we can ameliorate the suffering of children and adults at the border have two recommendations: send money to non-profits and write letters to your representatives in Congress. But the non-profits in spite of feverish activities in the Courts and elsewhere have been spectacularly ineffective. Congress after a long time has managed to pass a bill providing more resources for the Border patrol. But the bill provides no monitoring mechanisms. ICE and Border Patrol can do whatever they want, as before. Congress has not intervened on behalf of the refugee children being abused at the border. Neither non-profits nor Congress have been able to respond to the moral outrage of the majority of citizens. Citizens have been unable to act on their sense of justice being violated grossly at the border.

In the land of the free, citizens find themselves thwarted at every turn when they try to be faithful to their sense of justice. They can not put their understanding of what is right and wrong and of what they owe to their fellow humans at the border in practice.

Freedom does not amount to much when one is prevented from being a good person because all the power is in the hands of the morally damaged and the cruel.