"They Told Us To Behave Or We'd Be There Forever"

Sickening accounts are emerging from some of the children who've been held apart from their parents for weeks as part of the Trump regime's late, unlamented "zero tolerance" immigration policy (shorter: we don't want your kind changing our culture).  While a federal court has ordered that the more than 2,500 children separated from their parents must be returned to them by July 26, the trauma already experienced by these children could be long- lasting.

Here are just a few accounts from some of the children who were held in "shelters" around the country.  Imagine if these were your children or grandchildren:

“I felt like a prisoner,” said Diogo De Olivera Filho, a 9-year-old from Brazil who spent five weeks at a shelter in Chicago, including three weeks in isolation after getting chickenpox. When he got lonely and left his quarantined room to see other kids, he said the shelter put up a gate to keep him in. “I felt like a dog,” he said.  [snip]

Most of the children were reluctant to talk about what they went through while they were detained. 

“I don’t want to remember,” said one 10-year-old, who recounted watching an out-of-control kindergartner get injected with something after he misbehaved in class.  [snip]

Sandy was reunited with her mother on July 5 after 55 days at Southwest Key Combes, a shelter in Harlingen, Tex., that was caring for about 60 kids. Some had been separated from their parents; some had crossed the border on their own. 

For Sandy, it was a place of sorrow, fear and scoldings. 

“They told us to behave,” she said, “or we’d be there forever.”  [snip]

Diogo De Olivera Filho, the 9-year-old from Brazil, said he was used to sleeping late but that habit quickly got him in trouble at Casa Guadalupe. 

“They told me, ‘If you keep doing that, you’re going to have to stay here until you’re 18,’ ” he said. 

If it looks like child abuse and talks like child abuse, then it is child abuse.

These abusive acts have been, and are continuing to be, committed in the name of the American government, in your name and my name.  Just as with the deadly negligence that's been the hallmark of the Trump regime's non- response to the Hurricane Maria disaster in Puerto Rico, for these criminals and villains empathy and humanity are reserved for children and families of a certain color and ethnicity.  That there will likely never be a reckoning for those responsible for these horrors makes this all the more hard to swallow.

The moral stain of this era in America will never be washed away or absolved.  But we can strike a  heavy blow against these monsters in November.