As we celebrate the 4th of July, the Trump administration continues its reign of terror (safe from the threat of impeachment, thanks to Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi's utter ineptitude). If the signers of the Declaration of Independence were transported to 2019, they would hardly recognize our nation, and be even more befuddled that we can somehow celebrate while children languish in cages.
OK, many of the Founding Fathers did sort of turn a blind eye to 'black' children being kept in chains as slaves and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. But if we wish to be intellectually honest, we must also acknowledge many held a supremely high standard for what America ideally should be. America--if it is to live up to its full potential of being a global beacon of liberty and freedom--should be a literal asylum for all victims of oppression, regardless of where they were born.
"I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong" - George Washington, Letter to Reverend Francis Adrian Vanderkemp (May 28, 1788).
"I, George Washington, President of the United States, do recommend to all religious societies and denominations, and to all persons whomsoever within the United States to set apart and observe Thursday, the 19th day of February next, as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, and on that day to meet together and render their sincere and hearty thanks to the Great Ruler of Nations for the manifold and signal mercies which distinguish our lot as a nation...to imprint on our hearts a deep and solemn sense of our obligations to Him for them; to teach us rightly to estimate their immense value; to preserve us from the arrogance of prosperity, and from hazarding the advantages we enjoy by delusive pursuits;...to render this country more and more a safe and propitious asylum for the unfortunate of other countries; to extend among us true and useful knowledge; to diffuse and establish habits of sobriety, order, morality, and piety, and finally, to impart all the blessings we possess, or ask for ourselves, to the whole family of mankind." - George Washington, Proclamation of January 1, 1795
"[King George III] has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither" - grievance #7 of the Declaration of Independence (written by Thomas Jefferson).
In the words of the Declaration of Independence and George Washington, anyone who cheers Trump on as he keeps asylum-seeking children in cages is fundamentally un-American.
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In case you haven't been following the news, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines by pointing out that immigrant detention centers are concentration camps.
These are the camps where children are separated from their parents, kept in cages, not given adequate food, clothing, medicine, or even soap and toothbrushes. And it's not just children who are held in these dehumanizing conditions--adults and elderly individuals are also held in facilities without running water and told to 'just drink from a toilet' if they're thirsty...
As usual, Zionists and rightists have attacked her over her word choice (conveniently moving the focus away from the actual conditions the victims are being subjected to). They of course made no similar fuss when Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio proudly called his tent city prison a concentration camp--nor when Arpaio was pardoned by Trump!
For more information about what AOC saw in the concentration camps, refer to the following interview:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/the-whole-facilitys-culture-is-rotted-from-the-core-what-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-saw-inside-the-el-paso-camps/
"In early June, Ocasio-Cortez used her 3.7 million-follower Instagram feed to catapult attention onto the detention crisis. Echoing a small number of journalists and academics, she referred to the guarded facilities as concentration camps. ...
Her comments were met with a flurry of responses, both supportive and critical. But there was no denying that she had forced the country’s focus back onto what Trump and border officials had largely succeeded in turning into an invisible crisis. Formerly niche stories about squalid living conditions and immigrant deaths in detention got national notice. Workers at Wayfair walked out to protest their company’s profiting off the camps. Bank of America announced it would stop lending to private detention center companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group.
Congress, forced to address a spiraling national embarrassment, passed a $4.6 billion supplemental funding bill to fund the camps and the border force, including $145 million for the Pentagon and hundreds of millions for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and overtime for Customs and Border Protection employees. Proponents of the bill said it would improve conditions in the camps. Ocasio-Cortez and others objected, saying it will exacerbate the crisis.
On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez was part of a 16-member congressional delegation that got a rare glimpse inside three highly fortified facilities: “Casa Franklin,” a downtown facility housing children run by the nonprofit Southwest Key; the US Border Patrol Station at Hondo Pass; and the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas. Congressional staffers had privately worried that officials would sanitize and curtail their tour inside."
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As planned, the media's focus on the debate over semantics also takes away focus from other recent immigration-related news.
• A Facebook group with 9,500 members, consisting of current and former customs and border patrol agents, routinely circulates calls for cruelty towards immigrants. To put this into perspective, the total number of currently-employed customs and border patrol agents is 20,000.
• Trump has declared that a wave of massive ICE raids will begin soon after July 4.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/29/politics/ice-raids-immigration-fourth-of-july-donald-trump/index.html
Again, George Washington waged a war in order to make this nation an asylum for all of mankind. By ethnically cleansing undocumented immigrants, Trump betrays the very spirit of America and the American Dream.
"I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong" - George Washington
When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the grievance of the government's refusal to naturalize immigrants and refusal to encourage them to immigrate was listed 10 spots higher than the famous taxation without consent.
"[King George III] has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither" - grievance #7 of the Declaration of Independence
• In June 2018 Trump claimed he was ending the family separation policy. Regardless, 700 more families have been separated.
• Republican strategist Thomas Hofeller, who specialized in gerrymandering electoral districts, died last year. On his hard drives, documents were recently found showing he was a strong proponent of adding a question about citizenship status on the 2020 Census. Although the question seems innocent on its surface, Hofeller made it quite clear the intent was to redraw electoral districts in order to make them more "advantageous to Republican and Non-Hispanic Whites." The logic being citizens and non-citizens of Latino heritage would be intimidated from answering the Census, thereby under-counting the population in Democrat-leaning districts. (Census counts of population are used to determine things such as number of Representatives per state and drawing electoral districts).
For more information, see these articles:
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/30/728232221/gop-redistricting-strategist-played-role-in-push-for-census-citizenship-question
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/730260511/redistricting-gurus-hard-drives-could-mean-legal-political-woes-for-gop
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/07/how-dead-mans-hard-drives-are-exposing-gop-attack-democracy/
Hofeller was highly active in gerrymandering North Carolina electoral districts. North Carolina was infamous for its 2013 voter ID law, where lawmakers obtained data on ID ownership and voting behaviors based on race, and then, according to a federal court, "deliberately target[ed] African-Americans with almost surgical precision … in an effort to depress black turnout at the polls." (To add insult to injury, the North Carolina law was passed immediately after the Supreme Court decided to loosen provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965--which was designed to prevent this exact type of racism). I don't know if Hofeller was involved with the voter ID law, but it wouldn't surprise me.
More information about the voter ID law can be found here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/29/487935700/u-s-appeals-court-strikes-down-north-carolinas-voter-id-law
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/us/federal-appeals-court-strikes-down-north-carolina-voter-id-provision.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/us/politics/voter-id-laws-supreme-court-north-carolina.html
These add to the long list of cruelties that the Trump administration has been putting into policy since day 1.
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And if you still don't think the term concentration camp is merited, well, even the Taliban and Somali pirates treat their captives better than Republicans are treating defenseless children...
And who else is backing AOC? Well, of course, the Americans who were imprisoned 75 years ago on US soil.
The last time the US had concentration camps (if you ignore Indian Reservations, where poverty rates are 5 times higher than the US average and where life expectancy is as much as 20 years lower than the US average, and sites such as Guantanamo Bay where those who are deemed enemies of the state are imprisoned and tortured without trial) was during WWII, where US citizens of Japanese heritage were imprisoned from 1942 to 1946. Now, in clear words, our politicians are telling us our government has them once more.
For the time being, the present-day concentration camps contain undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. We are not yet at the point where there is a wide-scale imprisonment of US citizens in these concentration camps. (Although thousands of US citizens have "accidentally" been deported over the past decade--a practice which no doubt has continued under the Trump administration).
As I covered in my previous article, Republicans have continuously been ramping up their ethnic cleansing to levels which would have seemed insane before Trump took office. How long will it be until it is conceivable that the administration starts stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship and deporting them, or just continues to "accidentally" deport US citizens en masse?
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The existence of concentration camps on US soil leads us to the question--why aren't citizens and our supposed leaders doing more to put a stop to them?
Of course, cardboard signs will not stop additional individuals from being placed in concentration camps, nor will they liberate those currently imprisoned. Rightists are, of course, well-aware that cardboard signs are meaningless. In recent news, Republican Party members in Oregon walked out of a legislative session to stall a vote on climate change legislation, and called for support from rightist militias to mobilize and remain on standby in case they desired to escalate the issue. Not only that, but far-right militias already patrol the border and terrorize migrants.
If tensions continue to rise and reach 1960s or 1850s levels--where racist acts of extreme violence occurred on a weekly basis--cardboard signs will not protect anti-racist protestors, nor immigrants, nor US citizens of the "wrong" skin color from being slaughtered by rightist mobs. Even if Trump loses the 2020 election, far-rightists will not just quietly accept defeat and go back into the shadows. And with no John Browns or Malcolm Xs of this generation, leftists and anti-racists will lose every time far-right thugs are called to mobilize (and, again, the Oregon Republican Party is already doing this--it's not just isolated fringe nutjobs!!!)
"In 2016 the Boston Globe’s op-ed section produced a “satirical” front page imagining what headlines would look like under Trump. They got a lot right: “DEPORTATIONS TO BEGIN,” a headline read, with a sidebar on a looming trade war. Friday’s Miami Herald headline opens, “Deportation crackdown expected to start.” But when the Globe’s editors envisioned a Trump presidency, they figured there would be heavy pushback. “Riots continue,” the subhed says, and the article features round-the-clock protests blocking transportation infrastructure and filling the nation’s cities with teargas. There have been no riots, hardly even any serious protest. We can all see the tyranny; where is the resistance?
Since Trump’s ascension “The Resistance” has become a brand name, a content category, a group identity for the older suburban liberals who have boosted MSNBC to record audience numbers. Together The Resistance pores over every detail of the president’s internal affairs investigation, waiting for the day the cops finally throw the cuffs on Trump and his whole wicked cabal. A sizable portion of the audience is fully in earnest and is probably responding to the only call that’s been addressed to them, but The Resistance is no resistance movement."
For further thoughts on the non-existent US resistance and what it would take to actually resist, refer to this article, from which the quotes in this section were taken:
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Every time we say "it can't possibly get any worse," it does get worse. Every time we say "it can't possibly happen here," it does happen here. How long will it be until the Trump administration moves forward to put US citizens of Latino heritage in concentration camps as well? ...Let's not wait to find out.
