See ICE Detention and Trail of Tears photo credits below.
A long time ago, I remember listening, on my one-transistor radio, to Johnny Horton’s recording: Battle of New Orleans:
In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in a town in New Orleans
We fired our guns and the British kep a-comin'
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they begin to runnin'
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico***
That song was the genesis of my thinking of Andrew Jackson as a hero. He was, in fact, a courageous military leader and respected by his troops, too, including the native Americans who served with him at the Battle of New Orleans (War of 1812).
But, I know one person who still does, because he has Jackson’s portrait hanging in his office - Mr. Trump.
All this Jackson stuff has come to mind because I was wondering who is currently profiting from our modern day “Trail of Tears”, the immigrant detention centers and Mr. Trump’s border security industry.
"An analysis of the “border-industrial complex” by the Transnational Institute shows that the budgets of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have exploded in recent years. The combined budgets of the agencies have more than doubled since the mid-2000s — and are now 60 times higher than the immigration enforcement system received in 1980. By one estimate, the border security industry will more than double in value from approximately $305 billion in 2011 to some $740 billion in 2023."
I have never respected Mr. Trump. It is well past time for the United States to stop profiteering from exploitation and misery.
Over the course of a few days in early 2019, Selene Saavedra-Roman went from starting her dream job as a flight attendant to scrubbing toilets in a dreary Texas detention center.
“I knew not to argue or talk back — refusing to obey the guards’ commands would end up hurting us greatly,” she recalled in her testimony last week at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on immigrant detention. Saavedra-Roman, who was born in Peru and came to the U.S. 24 years ago at the age of 4, was in the process of applying for legal residency. But she was detained at the airport in Houston, Texas, after flying in from Mexico. Recalling the trauma of being locked up with other migrant women in desolate squalor, she testified, “If you volunteered for the work program [in the migrant jail], you would be compensated $1 an hour,” though it was understood that refusing to “volunteer” could jeopardize their immigration cases.
While Saavedra-Roman’s harrowing experience in the migrant jail came as a shock to her, the system she was trapped in had been building up from the time she first crossed the border as a child. Her unjust detention was the product of the Trump administration’s hardline deportation agenda. But the militarized border that had ensnared her was the product of a massive security infrastructure that has been building up for decades. Although Trump’s unabashedly anti-immigrant agenda has amplified the brutality of the border regime, he is merely capitalizing on a massive, entrenched network of corporate power and political influence.
Photo Credits
*Men stand in an Immigration and Border Enforcement detention center in McAllen, Texas, on July 12 during a visit by Vice President Mike Pence. | Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post via AP, Pool
**What Was the Trail of Tears?
It’s been a few days since Mr. Trump signed an executive order which, as he proclaimed, stopped separating immigrant children from parents and imprisoning them in concentration camps.
If you knew that more humane, less costly options existed for America to deal with asylum seekers, than taking kids from their parents or locking them up together, would you use it?
My answer is yes, I would.
Why doesn’t Mr. Trump?
“…there’s an alternative approach that’s cheaper, more humane and incredibly effective. The Trump administration just doesn’t want to use it.”
“The way the Trump administration talks about it, you’d think there are only two ways to respond to families crossing into the U.S. illegally: either separate kids from their parents while the adults are tried as criminals or put entire families into indefinite detention.
But there’s an alternative approach that’s cheaper, more humane and incredibly effective. The Trump administration just doesn’t want to use it.
The Family Case Management Program, which President Donald Trump ended several months after taking office, was meant to keep track of immigrant parents and kids in removal proceedings without having to keep them locked up. It was relatively small ? about 950 families in five locations. But it was hugely successful: More than 99 percent of families in the program showed up for their court dates, and 97 percent participated in required check-ins with their case managers, according to a report from Geo Care, the private prison company that operated the program. And it reportedly cost the government just $36 per family each day, versus $319 per bed per day in a family detention center.”
Freedom’s
price is high. It respects no national boundary and its fee continues to be
paid every day.
Today,
babies and children are paying the fee for their parents’ desire to be Americans.
Today
and every day into the foreseeable future until Mr. Trump gets the funding for
his “Wall”, we, the people of the United States,
will permit the Trump administration to separate another 66 kids from their mothers
and fathers. They will join some 2,500 already taken from their parents
and held in U.S. concentration camps. There is no Trump administration program to restore the children
to their parents.
Freedom’s
High Price is once again being paid by the innocents… the babies.
In
the United States today: the powerless; the children; the babies are always on the short
end of the stick.
The
real question is whether the rest of us are willing to surrender our souls and
squander our national heritage to let it continue that way.
What could be a crime so heinous as to order U.S. ICE Agents to rip children from the arms of their mothers; send them to separate prisons, hundreds of miles apart; and, jail them for months out of contact?
Why, trying to become an American, that is the crime.
So far, we have allowed nearly 2,000 children to be treated in this manner.
Have you no shame, Mr. Trump?
Have you no shame, Republican leadership?
How has it come to this? Has fear of Mr. Trump’s Tweets gutted your humanity and metastasized you into spineless toadies?
Rob Rogers’s cartoon on the Trump administration immigration policy.
Photograph: Rob Rogers*
The Toadies Are Coming
Are you as worried as I that we have passed out of the USA we thought we knew when we were children… a constitutional government… if it ever existed… into a neo-Nazi USA?
Every day now I see similarities with Nazi Germany. Perhaps the most alarming is how easily people accept Trump’s falsehoods and how the Republicans have become his enablers.
We have lost whatever flimsy connection we had with “truth”.
Editorial cartoonist Rob Roger’s firing by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is also a sign.
It appears to me that the corporate people at the paper are following the same script as their Nazi-journalists ancestors… they know they must maintain favor with the neo-Nazi USA or lose their jobs.
So, now they believe they must please the emerging Party. And, of course, President Trump!
The toadies can’t wait! They must be hopping with joy, thinking, "Soon the concentration camps will be overflowing with many, many more people than just immigrant children. They will be flooded with troublemakers of all kinds… all those less-than-humans who refuse to sign the loyalty pledge to Mr. Trump."
You’ll remember that she is the doctor who discovered
elevated levels of lead in the blood of children in Flint (24 Sept 2015) and worked tirelessly to
surface the problem against unremitting opposition by the Governor Snyder and
other state officials.
Earlier (8 Sept 2015) Dr. Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech
revealed that 40% of Flint had high levels of
lead in their City-supplied tap water and recommended that the State of Michigan declare that the water in Flint was not safe for cooking or drinking.
All of this happened - exposing over 100,000 Flint
residents, about 16,000 are children, to lead poisoning - due to the botched
switch from Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water* to Flint River water (2013)
in order to save a few shekels. A decision rendered by Snyder-appointed City of Flint Emergency Manager, Ed Kurtz.**
If Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha had not publicized her findings it
is very likely the people of Flint
would still be drinking, foul smelling, particulate loaded, poisoned water.
In my estimation Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is clearly a proven,
credible professional as well as a world class hero for taking on the state
politicians and battling for the wellbeing of the people of Flint.
By the way, did I mention that she is an Iraqi American… a U.S. citizen…
and an Iraqi immigrant?
While, for me anyway, her place of birth is just not as
important as who she is as a person. But for some people in this “Age of Trump” an "immigrant's place of birth" has become a critical issue, despite the fact, as she points out in her article, that… “more than 10,000
doctors in the United States graduated from medical schools in the seven countries
listed in the (Pres. Trump’s) recent travel ban.”
So, I thought you’d like to read her recent article which recently appeared in the New York Times.
Will We Lose the Doctor Who Would Stop the Next Flint?**
FLINT, Mich. — Eighteen months ago, as a
pediatrician here, I discovered that the untreated tap water corroding the
city’s plumbing was poisoning our children with lead. State officials called my
science faulty and accused me of creating hysteria. But I was right and
persisted, and with brave parents, pastors, journalists and scientists demanded
answers until this continuing public health disaster was finally acknowledged.
An entire city, with about 10,000 young children, was unnecessarily exposed to
lead, a neurotoxin that causes irreversible brain damage. The corrosive water
also likely caused the deaths of a dozen people from Legionnaires’ disease. Flint remains traumatized.
These days, along with others in the community, I spend my
time trying to make sure that the American dream is still a possibility for
this city’s kids. We are hoping to reduce the harm stemming from their exposure
to lead with a model public health program of family support, home visits,
early education, school health services, nutrition, health care access and
more.
But as a first-generation Iraqi immigrant, and as a doctor
whose job is to train other doctors, many of them immigrants themselves, I fear
that the American dream is corroding. I worry about the impact of President
Trump’s travel ban, for the moment blocked by court order, and how the
Republican Congress will handle immigration issues.
Of course, everyone in this country, except for Native
Americans, came from somewhere else. Many of us were fleeing something, or were
brought here by force in America’s
original sin. As an immigrant who holds a medical degree, I’m in good company.
The organization that accredits graduate medical training programs says that
there are more than 10,000 licensed physicians in the United States who graduated from
medical school in the seven countries the president listed in his travel ban.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges,
25 percent of practicing physicians in this country are foreign-trained, with
many of them working in the nation’s most vulnerable areas — places like my city
and in rural America. Rural counties overwhelmingly voted for President Trump;
with his election, they may now lose their health insurance, and their doctors.
What our country stands to lose by walls and bans, in
talent, drive, creativity and entrepreneurship, is staggering, but the personal
toll is greater. In 1980, my family arrived here full of hope, trading a future
of war, fascism and oppression for one of peace, freedom and opportunity. My
parents are secular progressives, dissidents who opposed Saddam Hussein’s
increasingly murderous and autocratic regime. A future in Iraq might have included
imprisonment or death at the hands of the government. It is through these
everyday-grateful immigrant eyes that I first saw our country as a 4-year-old
and still see it today.
As a young immigrant, I may have been scared, and my school
lunches looked and smelled different (no one knew what hummus or falafel was
back then), but I was embraced in the suburban Detroit community where I grew up as one of
the few brown kids.
The ban, and other equally ignominious limitations to
immigration that may be on their way, ignore the contributions of our
immigrants. Perhaps these limitations are an effort to return us to a
make-believe “Leave It to Beaver” past. Whatever the motivation, my family and
millions just like us are intertwined in the fabric of America. My mom taught English to
recent immigrants, while my dad worked for General Motors as an engineer for 31
years, designing custom alloys. Together, they instilled in me and my brother
an ethic of social justice and service-oriented work while providing us with a
better life. The American dream was our reality.
Today, people still want to come to America, as it remains the epitome
of freedom and prosperity, the richest country that ever was, and blessed by
tranquillity. Immigrants know that the laws here shelter diversity, protect
rights and property, and provide the opportunity for economic prosperity. America
is as great as ever. And as immigrants we understand it is our obligation to
continue making it great for all of us, no matter where we came from.
Now, though, there are little girls who look just like I did
at that age, who see their place in the American dream fading away, which makes
me wonder what we all stand to lose. Perhaps we are losing the kid who breaks
the code of cancer; or the one who figures out how to make our economy grow
better, to lessen inequality and provide more fulfilling jobs; or maybe the kid
who starts the next great tech start-up. Six of America’s seven 2016 Nobel Prize
winners were immigrants. In a previous generation, immigrant autoworkers became
the backbone of the United Auto Workers, which was empowered by the Flint sit-down strike in
the winter of 1936-37.
I grew up in an America that embraced, supported
and celebrated me and my striving for a better life. I grew up confident and
competent and keenly aware as an immigrant from a broken country that there is
injustice in the world and understanding the need to always fight for justice.
Indeed, this is what has guided and framed my work in Flint, where the children I treat woke to a
nightmare of usurped democracy, environmental injustice and criminal government
neglect.
For my Flint
kids, the immediate daily struggle continues. Even now, more than a year after
the city’s water problems were discovered, people here must rely on filtered
and bottled water. We are still seeking the long-term government support to
make sure kids here succeed. And while I’m glad I was there to help bring the
Flint water crisis to light, I can’t help wondering if, with new limits on
immigration, we are losing the next pediatrician who will expose a future
public health disaster.
The sanctuary our nation provides benefits all of us, but
that is not why we do it. It is the right thing to do. It was right yesterday
and it is right in this moment, too. The “mother of exiles” has always embraced
our children.
Today, there is a little brown girl like me, stuck beyond
our border but hoping to come to this country. She is scared and tired. But her
fresh eyes are wide, she is strong and hopeful, and she dreams our American
dream.
*One of the
largest water and sewer systems in the United States, the Detroit
Water and Sewerage Department supplies
water services to 126 communities and seven S.E. Michigan counties.
