It’s not child abuse if you do it to a brown baby. And it’s not Shari’a law if you call it Christian. That, in brief, is the immigration policy of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions. And the lame lies they told this week don’t change it.
President Trump claimed for months that he was powerless to stop Sessions’ policy of mandatory child abuse — taking children and babies away from their mothers and throwing them into prisons hundreds of miles apart — until the president claimed to have done so with the stroke of a pen Wednesday.
But Lying Donnie hasn’t really ended it. He just tweaked it.
Babies are still being thrown in jail for the despicable crime of having been carried.
Two thousand three hundred children and their thousands of parents are still being held incommunicado in prisons — and countries — hundreds and thousands of miles apart.
It’s still unclear how, or even if, Trump’s executive order will be implemented. And even if it is, it does nothing for the 2,300 children and counting who have been ripped from their parents and brothers and sisters and thrown into distant prisons.
And babies are still being arrested and thrown into prison for the despicable crime of fleeing violence in Mom’s and Dad’s arms.
I must be more powerful than the president of the United States, then, because I stopped mass child abuse like this quicker than he did, with a few phone calls.
The year was 1985. The Reagan administration had just opened the first immigration prison ever built specifically to imprison mothers and babies. It was a private prison in Laredo, run by the Corrections Corporation of America.
CCA policy was to strip-search everyone — with body-cavity searches — before and after each time they sought legal counsel. And only if they sought legal counsel. That’s right, the INS (now known as ICE) and CCA looked up the vaginas and anuses of little children, twice, each time their mother sought legal advice. They strip-searched mom too.
I was working for nothing as a paralegal for Patrick Hughes, an immigration attorney who, like me, lived on outrage.
Just as Trump and Sessions do today, a generation later, the government lied and passed the buck. INS said it couldn’t stop the child abuse because CCA ran the prison. CCA — now known as CoreCivic — refused to answer questions: and it didn’t have to, because it’s a private company.
I will not rehearse the trauma to which these mothers and children were subjected, though it disturbs me to this day. And how do you imagine they feel?
But at least Reagan let the children stay with their mothers while they were both being sexually abused.
So which is worse:
- a) to sexually abuse a child in the presence of her mother?
- b) to sexually abuse a mother in the presence of her child?
- c) to take the child away from her mother and send them to distant prisons for a time that could last forever — and certainly seems so to both of them, especially the child?
- d) to deport the mother and leave the baby in jail?
- e) all of the above
- f) none of the above
