The Shame of Our Border Cruelty

The American Prospect
By DAVID DAYEN JULY 3, 2019
This is a call to action

Every successive Republican administration in the 21st century eats away a little bit more of our collective souls. The Bush administration tortured Muslims at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and black sites around the world, reducing us to a nation led by war criminals who, even worse, got away with it. The CIA has twice been led since Bush’s departure by individuals complicit in the depravity.

Today the black sites are on our shores, accessible from U.S. highways, in Clint and El Paso, Texas, among other places. The torturing of brown-skinned people has come home, in locked cells where women and children fleeing violence and death have been kidnapped, brutalized, humiliated, degraded. It’s been carried out by an agency, Customs and Border Patrol, whose own words on a private Facebook group reveal their lack of humanity, their tendency to other-ize asylum seekers as one would an enemy in wartime, and to be honest their comfort with fascism.

This is a time only of action, not strongly worded letters or battle cries or even the words you’re reading right now....Thinking about whether middle America is ready for a more welcoming immigration policy while state-sponsored torture is occurring would be like wondering about the political practicalities of busing while the bodies of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi during Freedom Summer were exhumed, or the four little girls at the church in Birmingham, Alabama. The state is carrying out a sadistic fantasy, repressing Hispanic men, women, and children for sport. They’re doing it intentionally, with purpose and glee. The primary question, the only question worth asking, is what those in power, and those of us with only the power to enter the streets, are going to do about it.

https://prospect.org/article/shame-our-border-cruelty