Trump Is Putting Refugee Children In Black Sites

Politics Features American Concentration Camps
Trump Is Putting Refugee Children In Black Sites

Family separation is still happening, and child concentration camps are still on our southern border. Just because the horrific news has receded from major media’s front pages and TV A-blocks doesn’t mean the horror has ended. Per Reveal:

The federal government is relying on secret shelters to hold unaccompanied minors, in possible violation of the long-standing rules for the care of immigrant children, a Reveal investigation has found.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the government agency that cares for unaccompanied minors, has never made the shelters’ existence public or even disclosed them to the minors’ own attorneys in a landmark class-action case.

It remains unclear how many total sites are under operation, but there are at least five in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia, holding at least 16 boys and girls for the refugee agency, some as young as 9 years old.

The CIA uses this tactic to house whoever the CIA is presently interrogating. The reason they use unknown “black sites” is so that they can conduct whatever business they are conducting in complete and total secrecy. Now it seems as if America is taking that same concept and applying it to refugee children.

This is why Hitler loved our country. In Mein Kampf, Hitler cited the same 1924 Immigration Act beloved in present times by Jeff Sessions and former George W. Bush speechwriter/current MSNBC Contributor, David Frum. We have immigration laws that the Nazis pointed to as a model for what they wanted to create for their supposed white supremacist utopia. White supremacy is and always has been the defining feature of the laws and customs of the United States of America. This country’s foundation is centered around genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of black people.

Stop saying “we’re better than this.” We should be, but we aren’t. We never have been.

In addition to this American horror show, according to Reveal, “Minors being held at the clandestine facilities initially were placed at known shelters around the country but later were transferred to these off-the-books facilities that specialize in providing for youth with mental health and behavioral challenges.”

Refugee children with mental health and behavioral challenges who are separated from their parents are being housed in Trump-run facilities (while other facilities the Trump administration has sent refugee children to have been found to have histories of sexual abuse and neglect), and this story is nowhere to be found on the homepages of CNN, New York Times and The Washington Post as of the day after Reveal’s report.

As the saying goes: This is America.

America is like this because we have made it like this. Instead of dealing with our evil history built on centuries of slavery and genocide, we tell ourselves fairy tales to reverse-engineer the past to fit a propagandistic notion of this country that never manifested itself in reality.

James Madison, one of the Founders “who read their Greek history” as the esoteric man noted, would find the esoteric man’s take to be completely ahistorical. Per James Madison in The Federalist No. 10 (emphasis NYT Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie’s):

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.

A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

The electoral college exists because southern states wanted to have representation proportional to their population, but they did not want their slaves to be able to vote. This is how Article 1 Section 2 Clause 3 of the United States constitution came to define “all other Persons” as legally three-fifths of a human. It’s called the “Three-Fifths Compromise” for a reason. America’s founding document compromised with white supremacy and literally baked white supremacy into our society.

Trump has introduced a new spin on the longstanding horror of America’s inherent racial inequality. These crimes against humanity are not new, they are just a Trumped-up version of what we normally do. With Trump’s ascendance to the White House on a policy of anti-immigrant hatred, this now marks roughly the third century in a row where America has made a revanchist turn towards our innate bigotry. We passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1789 that gave the president new powers to deport immigrants while restricting their right to vote. The aforementioned 1924 Immigration Act beloved by Hitler and plenty of present-day Americans on the right set quotas on what countries immigrants could be accepted from—completely excluding immigrants from Asia. In 2016, faced with another fake immigration panic, America awarded the presidency to a man whose platform was centered around attacking immigrants, and now that Trump has followed through on his word with black site child concentration camps, the collective response seems to mostly be a resigned shrug now that the initial shock of the already-known child concentration camps has worn off. In a way, a shrug makes way more sense than the esoteric man’s tweet above. This kind of evil is completely in line with what we should come to expect from this definitionally white supremacist nation.

Jacob Weindling is a staff writer for Paste politics. Follow him on Twitter at @Jakeweindling.

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