[Preface: since I wrote the comments below, Trump has, by executive order, changed the zero-tolerance anti-immigration policy to end—supposedly—the separation of parents from children. Done not on humanitarian grounds, but because of bad optics. But the optics won’t improve much any time soon, since the administration has no answer to the question of how to reunite the families already separated—records of who belongs with whom, and where they are, have evidently not been systematically kept. The prospect exists of some children never being reunited with their parents. There is also no answer as to how they are going to house the thousands of families who are not being separated. Callousness and inattention to human rights have become hallmarks of the Trump government, and now we can add incompetence to that list.]
Fear here, there, and everywhere
Donald Trump has fear working for him on both sides of the Mexican border: he galvanizes his base with fear of immigrant hoodlums, and scares refugees with the prospect of separating children from parents, and sending asylum-seekers back to the horrors from which they fled
The U.S. “will not be a migrant camp,” asserted the President in defense of the zero-tolerance policy that has resulted in more than 2,400 children, many of them toddlers and some infants, being separated from their parents, beginning in April. He added he would not let migrants “infest” America.
Continue reading “Climate of Fear: Short Term Effectiveness, Long Term Error”