Demanding Justice and Embodying Compassion for Separated Families

The past Sunday, June 30, 2019, a number of friends and I joined with over 1,000 others in Minneapolis to rally and march against the Trump administration's rhetoric and policies on immigration, especially as they relate to the inhumane practice of separating families seeking asylum at the southern border; a separation that involves the placing of migrant children in over-crowded and unsanitary "detention centers" that have been described as concentration camps.

The Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) and the local chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations organized the march, alarmed not only by what is happening on the southern border but also by the ongoing Trump administration policies that ban travelers from Muslim-majority countries.

The march, dominated by families with children, started at the corner of Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue and culminated with speeches at the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis.

“Today we stand in solidarity and resistance,” the Rev. Ruth MacKenzie, a minister at First Universalist, told those in attendance. “We are fighting the racist policies hurting families and traumatizing communities.”

In reporting on the gathering at First Universalist, Marcheta Fornoff of Minnesota Public Radio News writes: “[S]peakers shared their stories and spoke against the separation of families, threats of deportation and other federal actions that have made headlines for months. President Trump has made stricter immigration and border control a signature issue of his campaign and presidency.”

For Sunday's march and rally I wore a t-shirt in support of Marianne Williamson's presidential campaign as I appreciate not only the forceful way that Williamson names and denounces the Trump administration's policies . . .





. . . but also her follow-up call to action:

Trump has politicized fear but we will politicize love.

And that's exactly what I and many others understood ourselves to be doing as we protested and marched through the streets of south Minneapolis on Sunday. We were embodying compassion and demanding justice for our immigrant brothers and sisters.

Following are more images from Sunday's march and rally. They are accompanied by a compilation of excerpts from recent op-eds and commentaries on the situation at the southern border.

America has much ugliness and many horrors in its history, ranging from genocide committed against Native Americans, to over two centuries of slavery as a legal institution, to concentration camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. Most of us like to think that at least since [then] America has, by and large, embraced its better angels and cast aside the hate and bigotry of the past. Yet, as the ongoing human rights crisis at America's border with Mexico reveals, a portion of Americans, including Donald Trump and Mike Pence, exhibit a moral bankruptcy not that far removed from that of Germans who either participated in or conveniently looked the other way as Hitler and his Nazi regime committed atrocities and millions were murdered. Among those seemingly condoning the horrors at the border are evangelical Christians who continue to support Trump and his nightmarish policies. Indeed, as I have noted before, in the era of Trump, one cannot be a decent and moral person and be a Republican or Trump supporter. The two are mutually exclusive. For the rest of us, if we do not do all in our power to remove Trump and his acolytes from power, we become as soulless as his followers.

– Michael Hamer
Excerpted from “America Is Losing Its Soul”
Michael-In-Norfolk
June 27, 2019

There are two categories of people trying to come into the United States, and Trump is blending them together. One category would be cartel people. They have enough money to buy an airport and a jumbo jet and as many passports and visas as they want. We’re not going to be watching them swimming the river. The most important category are the refugees. And they’re fleeing this ungodly world of violence and exploitation that’s being set up by the cartels all through Central America and for most of Mexico. We also have many people coming in from Africa who are fleeing genocide against their ethnic minority, or, for example, a young man from Ghana who is gay and was nearly killed by a vigilante mob and who was nearly deported last week.

. . . [T]he United States has everything to do with the creation of the monsters that are driving the refugees up to our border. They’re fleeing the cartels. Who are the heads of the cartels? Well, after the dirty wars ended, that included genocide and daily acts of torture and terror, according to the United Nations, those people changed their uniforms and became the head of the cartel groups. They’re extremely wealthy. They have full military experience, which is why a gang of young people are able to pull aside a bus so accurately. And they have unlimited access to all of the weaponry and everything else that they need.

Now, who were the people at the head of military intelligence, for example, in Guatemala? Well, those were people who were trained in the United States, worked very closely with the United States intelligence throughout the genocide. And we were, of course, severely criticized for that by the United Nations Truth Commission, and President Clinton apologized. Two hundred thousand people were killed by those death squads. Those of us that survived that era, we remember the sorts of torture and mutilations that the bodies would bear, when we found them out in the street. And they’re the same as now.

So, what’s happened is, the cartel leaders are the same people that worked hand in glove with the United States. They were armed by the United States. They were trained by the United States. They were sold equipment by the United States. And to a large extent, they’re still being protected by our intelligence division. They will not release key files on the genocide if it involved someone that used to work with our people.

– Jennifer Harbury
Excerpted from “Today’s Refugee Crisis Is Blowback
From U.S. Dirty Wars in Central America”
Democracy Now! via TruthOut
June 28, 2019

The debate over whether “concentration camps” is the right term for migrant detention centers on the southern border has drawn long-overdue attention to the American government’s dehumanizing treatment of defenseless children. A pediatrician who visited in June said the centers could be compared to “torture facilities.” Having studied mass atrocities for over a decade, I agree.

At least seven migrant children have died in United States custody since last year. The details reported by lawyers who visited a Customs and Border Protection facility in Clint, Texas, in June were shocking: children who had not bathed in weeks, toddlers without diapers, sick babies being cared for by other children. As a human rights lawyer and then as a political scientist, I have spoken to the victims of some of the worst things that human beings have ever done to each other, in places ranging from Cambodia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sri Lanka. What’s happening at the border doesn’t match the scale of these horrors, but if, as appears to be the case, these harsh conditions have been intentionally inflicted on children as part a broader plan to deter others from migrating, then it meets the definition of a mass atrocity: a deliberate, systematic attack on civilians. And like past atrocities, it is being committed by a complex organizational structure made up of people at all different levels of involvement.

– Kate Cronin-Furman
Excerpted from “The Treatment of Migrants
Likely ‘Meets the Definition of a Mass Atrocity’”
The New York Times
June 29, 2019

Surely, the United States of America could not operate concentration camps. In the American consciousness, the term is synonymous with the Nazi death machines across the European continent that the Allies began the process of dismantling 75 years ago this month. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has a more global definition. There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and—with Japanese internment—the United States. In fact, she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.

“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Historians use a broader definition of concentration camps, as well.

"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it," says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. "Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."

Not every concentration camp is a death camp – in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. Systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies – as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War – as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Camps set up with one aim can be repurposed by new regimes, often with devastating consequences.

History is banging down the door this week with the news the Trump administration will use Fort Sill, an Oklahoma military base that was used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II, to house 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children captured at the border. Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder. Of course, the Obama administration temporarily housed migrants at military bases, including Fort Sill, for four months in 2014, built many of the newer facilities to house migrants, and pioneered some of the tactics the Trump administration is now using to try to manage the situation at the border.

The government of the United States would never call the sprawling network of facilities now in use across many states “concentration camps,” of course. They’re referred to as “federal migrant shelters” or “temporary shelters for unaccompanied minors” or “detainment facilities” or the like. (The initial processing facilities are run by Border Patrol, and the system is primarily administered to by the Department of Homeland Security. Many adults are transferred to ICE, which now detains more than 52,000 people across 200 facilities on any given day – a record high. Unaccompanied minors are transferred to Department of Health and Human Services custody.) But by Pitzer's measure, the system at the southern border first set up by the Bill Clinton administration, built on by Barack Obama's government, and brought into extreme and perilous new territory by Donald Trump and his allies does qualify.

– Jack Holmes
Excerpted from “An Expert on Concentration Camps Says
That's Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border”
Esquire
June 13, 2019

At least 2,000 children have now been forcibly separated from their parents by the United States government. Their stories are wrenching. Antar Davidson, a former youth-care worker at an Arizona shelter, described to the Los Angeles Times children “huddled together, tears streaming down their faces,” because they believed that their parents were dead. Natalia Cornelio, an attorney with the Texas Human Rights Project, told CNN about a Honduran mother whose child had been ripped away from her while she was breastfeeding. “Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing,” the Associated Press reported. “One cage had 20 children inside.”

In some cases, parents have been deported while their children are still in custody, with no way to retrieve them. John Sandweg, a former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told NBC News that some of these family separations will be permanent. “You could be creating thousands of immigrant orphans in the U.S. that one day could become eligible for citizenship when they are adopted,” he said.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly blithely assured NPR in May that “the children will be taken care of—put into foster care or whatever.” The administration’s main focus is not the welfare of the children, as much as the manner in which breaking up families at the U.S.-Mexico border could send a message to other migrants fleeing violence or persecution. Kelly defended the policy as a “tough deterrent.”

The crisis, to the extent that one exists, is of the administration’s own making. The people fleeing to the U.S. border are a threat neither to American economic prosperity nor to public safety, there is not a great surge of border crossers requiring an extreme response. There are a variety of options for dealing with them short of amnesty, and the separation of families is not legally required.

The policy’s cruelty is its purpose: By inflicting irreparable trauma on children and their families, the administration intends to persuade those looking to America for a better life to stay home.

– Adam Serwer
Excerpted from “Family Separation
Reveals the Logic of Trumpism”
The Atlantic
June 20, 2019

Yeah, I know what you’re going to say: “I’m not against people coming here, I just want them to do it the right way.”

The “right way,” is a phrase used by people who’ve never experienced true desperation.

The “right way,” is a telling symptom of inherited privilege that was born insulated from extreme poverty and violence.

The “right way,” is the rally cry of someone who’s never been faced with the kind of urgency that leaves you utterly hopeless.

. . . If your house is engulfed in scorching flames and you’re trying to escape, what’s the “right way” to leave? The only way you can.

– John Pavlovitz
Excerpted from “Why Do You Think They Cross the Border?”
JohnPovlovitz.com
May 31, 2019

I close with Henri Nouwen’s wise and beautiful words on compassion and the deep and mysterious way that, as humans, we are connected to one another.

Compassion grows with the inner recognition that your neighbor shares your humanity with you. This partnership cuts through all walls which might have kept you separate. Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, destined for the same end. With this compassion you can say, “In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my hands. Their flesh is my flesh; their blood is my blood; their pain is my pain; their smile is my smile. Their ability to torture is in me, too; their capacity to forgive I find also in myself. There is nothing in me that does not belong to them, too. There is nothing in them that does not belong to me, too. In my heart, I know their yearning for love and down to my entrails, I can feel their cruelty. In another’s eyes, I see my plea for forgiveness and in a hardened frown, I see my refusal. . . . In the depths of my being, I meet my fellow humans with whom I share love and hate, life and death.”

– Henri Nouwen
Excerpted from With Open Hands
Ave Maria Press, 1972
p. 92

Related Off-site Links:
Protesters March in Minneapolis Over U.S. Immigration Policies – Madeline Deninger (Bring Me the News, July 1, 2019).
Marchers Protesting Immigration and Border Policies Fill Minneapolis Streets – Marcheta Fornoff (Minnesota Public Radio News, June 30, 2019).
Marchers in Minneapolis Protest ICE Policies Separating Families, Immigration Raids – Shannon Prather (Star Tribune, July 1, 2019).
Hundreds Turn Out in Minneapolis to Protest Separation of Migrant Families on Southern Border – Kristi Belcamino (Pioneer Press, June 30, 2019).
Doctor Details ‘Insane,’ ‘Demoralizing’ Conditions for Kids at Texas Migrant Detention Center – Sophie Novack (Texas Observer, June 27, 2019).
Immigrants Prepare for ICE Raids Despite Cancellation of Trump Order – PRI (June 24, 2019).
Delayed Immigration Raids Will Start After July 4, Trump Says – Shannon Pettypiece (Fortune, July 2, 2019).
Marianne Williamson: Yes, Trump’s ICE Raids Are Exactly Like Nazi Germany – Evan McMorris-Santoro (VICE News, June 19, 2019).
This Is the Week It Became Accurate to Compare Trump to Hitler – Lucian K. Truscott IV (Salon, June 29, 2019).
Do Americans Understand They’re Beginning to Commit The Legal Definition of Genocide? – Umair Haque (Medium, June 21, 2019).
“It Is Immoral”: Former First Lady Laura Bush Criticizes the Separation of Migrant Children from Their Parents – Tara Francis Chan (Business Insider, June 17, 2019).
“Christians Everywhere Should Be Up in Arms”: Willie Nelson Speaks Out on Immigrant Family Separations at Border – Caitlin O'Kane (CBS News, June 19, 2017).
“It Is a Stain on Our Country”: Sen. Elizabeth Warren Joins Protest Outside Child Detention Facility in Florida – Eoin Higgins (Common Dreams, June 26, 2017).
Five 2020 Candidates Tried to Tour the Florida Prison Camp for Migrant Kids. They Were All Blocked – Gabe Ortiz (Daily Kos, June 28, 2019).
If Conditions for Detained Migrant Children Got Worse, How Would We Know? – Jack Herrera (Pacific Standard, June 26, 2019).
Trump Administration's “Tent Cities” Cost More Than Keeping Migrant Kids With Parents – Julia Ainsley (NBC News, June 20, 2019).
Here’s Why Right-Wingers Can Be “Pro-Life” Yet Still Be Fine With Child Detention at the Border – Rebecca Onion (Slate, June 28, 2019).
Detention Or Concentration Camps? The Language Debate Is a Sideshow – Miles Howard (WBUR.org, June 20, 2019).
U.S. Company Making $750 Per Day, Per Child to Keep Immigrant Children in “Prison-Like” Conditions – Tod Perry (Good, June 24, 2019).
Bank of America to Stop Financing Private Prisons Amid Outrage Over Border Camps – Tom Cahill (Grit Post, June 26, 2019).
The Trump Administration Has Let 24 People Die in ICE Custody – Gaby Del Valle (VICE News, June 10, 2019).
Immigrant Kids Keep Dying in CBP Detention Centers, and DHS Won’t Take Accountability – Cynthia Pompa (ACLU.org, June 24, 2019).
Trump's Fans Think He's a Macho He-Man – He's Really a Moral Weakling Who Preys on Women and Kids – Amanda Marcotte (Salon, June 25, 2019).


UPDATES: Everything We Know About the Inhumane Conditions at Migrant Detention Camps – Matt Stieb (New York Magazine, July 2, 2019).
Drinking Out of Toilets: The Conditions in Border Patrol Facilities Are Beyond Horrifying – Ryan Bort (Rolling Stone, July 2, 2019).
The U.S. Is ‘Headed to Fascism,’ Says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez After Tour of Detention Facilities at Southern Border – Hunter Walker (The Huffington Post, July 2, 2019).
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Her Trip to the Border: “I Don’t Know How to Tell People How Unbelievable It Is” – Jodi Westrick (MicighanRadio.org, July 3, 2019).
Trump’s Border Obscenities Will Shame America for Decades – Timothy L. O'Brien (Bloomberg, July 3, 2019).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Quote of the Day – June 27, 2019
• Honoring Óscar and Valeria
• “What We're Seeing Here Is a Tipping Point”
• Opposing the Trump Administration's Inhumane Treatment of Immigrant Families
• Jeremy Scahill on the Historical Context of the Trump Administration's "Pathologically Sick" Anti-Immigrant Agenda
• Something to Think About – June 14, 2018
• On International Human Rights Day, Saying "No" to Donald Trump and His Fascist Agenda
• Quote of the Day – March 12, 2018
• 2000+ Take to the Streets of Minneapolis to Express Solidarity with Immigrants and Refugees
• Trump's America: Normalized White Supremacy and a Rising Tide of Racist Violence
• Fasting, Praying, and Walking for Immigration Reform
• A Prayer for Refugees

Opening image: Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC).
All other images: Michael J. Bayly.