Voters must hold Donald Trump and Mike Pence accountable for gross immigrant abuse

"The Trump administration is lying",.... opinion echo.

Maine Writer sub title: Nazi tactics on innocent immigrants.

Mr. Pence, where were your pro-life values when immigrant children needed protection? | Opinion Echo by Fabiola Santiago*, published in the Miami Herald

Six little words were all the United States needed to raze centuries of claims of moral leadership about family values. 

“We need to take away children,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions insisted in May 2018.

Remember the children when you vote in this election.

You, privileged American, may have tried to forget their brown skin torched by the sun and little bodies dehydrated and exhausted from the multi-country trek to the U.S. border. 

A perilous journey taken only to be torn from their immigrant parents at the doorstep of their shot at the humblest version of the American Dream.

Not even babies were spared.

“We need to take away children,” the aging former senator and xenophobe commanded.

And all the way down the chain — his deputy Rod J. Rosenstein, five Department of Justice prosecutors at the border, Border Patrol agents, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), they fell in line and did the unthinkable.

They took some 2,600 children from their parents and sent them to faraway detention camps and foster-care facilities.

It was wholesale, horrific cruelty carried out by an administration denying that separating immigrant families was the intention of the new “zero tolerance” policy meant to deter immigrants from seeking refuge here from violence, death threats and poverty.

Two years later, we can confirm what we long suspected in a draft of a new 86-page report by the watchdog office of the Inspector General obtained by The New York Times.

The Trump administration was lying.

Separation wasn’t a byproduct of parents making the choice to pursue their asylum claims. It was direct, ordered punishment — and a way to send a message to others to stay away.

No child was too young to be separated from their parents, Rosenstein told prosecutors. He had escaped scrutiny but the report shows he aided and abetted Sessions.

The Inspector General's report isn’t the only sick revelation to come to light about Donald Trump’s heinous immigration policies as he faces re-election and, according to the latest polls, the prospect of losing to Democrat Joe Biden.

STERILIZATIONS IN DETENTION, ABUSE

In a whistleblower complaint filed with Homeland Security in September, a nurse who worked at an immigration detention center in Georgia said a doctor performed questionable hysterectomies on immigrant women, refused to test the detainees for COVID-19 and shredded medical records.

“The uterus collector,” the nurse called him.

A subsequent investigation by Associated Press found that Dr. Mahendra Amin performed at least eight gynecological procedures on immigrant women in ICE custody. Some said they didn’t understand what was happening or consent to the treatment.

How did the government react to the complaints?

ICE (Immigration-Deportation!) tried to deport one of the immigrant women speaking out; she had been through the unwanted removal of a Fallopian tube.

And so, in dribs and drabs of watchdog investigations and journalism, Americans are learning that our government is mirroring the behavior of rogue states and being condemned by international human-rights organizations.

In July, another report, this one obtained by the Miami Herald and written by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the federal agency tasked with oversight of immigrant children, revealed that the children have suffered abuse.

At least four Central American immigrant children reported being sexually abused by staff members at the privately run Homestead detention center for unaccompanied minors, now shut down.

That the violations happened in this community of refuge to generations of immigrants only adds to the tragedy.

Many other children also were hurt in detention.
And, just when you think you’ve seen enough, along comes another outrage.

CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE

Dozens of families separated at the border have filed claims against the U.S. government, some claiming that their children were sexually, physically or emotionally abused in federally funded foster care.

These children relive their traumas in nightmares.

IMMIGRATION ABSENT IN 2020 ELECTION

You ask: Why should we care at this point?

Besides for reasons of basic human decency, the politics that drove our shameful actions are still relevant, still with us.

Yet the topic of immigration, a cauldron of discord in 2016, during the years of “zero tolerance” abuses, has been largely absent from the fireworks of the 2020, election.

It’s round two for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rally cry and social engineering maneuvers to stop the growth of the Latino population in the United States. Only he hides now behind labels like Latinos for Trump and his followers are all to happy to give him cover.

Voters should hold Donald Trump accountable for the abuses committed on his watch.

But in a race only won by uniting coalitions of voters, immigration is an inconvenient subject for both political parties, too divisive.

What’s clear, however, from what we now know is that the party of bible-quoting Sessions, the party with the claim to being pro-life, supports the abuser of children.

“I couldn’t be more proud to serve as vice president to a president who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life. I’m pro-life, I don’t apologize for it,” Vice President Mike Pence said during his debate with Sen. Kamala Harris.

His words ring hollow to the core.

Mr. Vice President, where were your pro-life values when immigrant children needed protection?

The children, targeted to punish the adults, have changed who we are as a nation.

“Let’s be clear: A society is judged based on how it treats its children,” she said. “A society is judged based on how it treats the least among us. And we will be judged harshly. History will judge us harshly because of what this Administration has done.”

Senator Harris- She wins the morality play, Mr. Vice President.

The United States bid goodbye to family values when we failed to protect young, defenseless immigrant children in need. And their mothers, too.

Senator Harris predicted this would happen in an impassioned call to end the family separation policy on the Senate floor in 2018.

* Award-winning columnist Fabiola Santiago has been writing about all things Miami since 1980, when the Mariel boatlift became her first front-page story. A Cuban refugee child of the Freedom Flights, she’s also the author of essays, short fiction, and the novel “Reclaiming Paris.”

Speak softly but vote big! Congratulations to the Democratic National Committee

At the successful Democratic National Convention, Senator Harris didn't need to be loud to be heard.

Echo opinion written by Carla Hall and published in the Arizona Daily Sun newspaper.

"The notion that people would not vote this year is alarming. I’ve never understood how anyone today — certainly any person of color — would sit out any election when people in this country put their lives in danger to guarantee us all the right to mail in a ballot or walk to a polling place and be allowed to vote."- President Obama

It’s OK that there wasn’t a roaring crowd in a packed auditorium to watch Sen. Kamala Harris become the first Black woman to accept a major party’s nomination for vice president of the United States. It’s OK that there was just a podium and unnerving silence when she uttered the first words of the most important speech of her life. And it was even OK for those of us watching to stop weeping that her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, wasn’t alive to see this.

It was OK because Harris wasn’t crying when she talked about the most important woman in her life, her mother, who came from India as a 19-year-old to study at the University of California, Berkeley, hoping to cure cancer but dying of it in 2009. She was the woman who taught her daughters that service to others gives purpose to life.

“Ohh, how I wish she were here tonight,” Harris said, smiling triumphantly. “But I know she’s looking down on me from above. I keep thinking about that 25-year-old Indian woman, all of 5 feet tall, who gave birth to me at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California. On that day she probably could have never imagined that I would be standing here before you now and speaking these words: I accept your nomination for vice president of the United States of America.”

And never far from any speaker’s agenda Wednesday night was the need for people to go vote. By mail, in person, whatever. Just figure it out and do it. Harris saluted the recent 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. “Yet so many of the Black women who helped secure that victory were still prohibited from voting long after its ratification,” she noted. “But they were undeterred. Without fanfare or recognition, they organized and testified and rallied and marched and fought not just for their vote but for a seat at the table.”

The notion that people would not vote this year is alarming. I’ve never understood how anyone today — certainly any person of color — would sit out any election when people in this country put their lives in danger to guarantee

And that was kind of the night it was. It was a quiet convention night, but it would be hard to imagine a more powerful one. 

Instead of speechifying, Harris — and President Barack Obama before her and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before him on Wednesday night — just talked to people. It was casual, it was intimate and it was searing.

President Obma said he understood that an immigrant may look around and wonder whether there was a place for him. He understood that a young person might look around and think this is all a circus. What’s the point?

“Well, here is the point,” he said. “This president and those in power and those who benefit from keeping things the way they are, they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they are hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote and convince you that your vote doesn’t matter. That is how they win. That is how they get to keep making decision that affect your life.”

It was the most compelling argument I’ve heard to reach Americans so disenchanted that they won’t vote at all.

And that’s part of what Obama spoke about as easily and authentically as if he were simply talking to you in your living room over a beer (or a glass of wine).

“Look, I understand why a lot of Americans are down on government,” Obama said. “The way the rules have been set up and abused in Congress make it easier for special interests to stop progress than to make progress. Believe me, I know it. I understand why a white factory worker seeing his wages cut or his job shift overseas believes the government no longer looks out for him and why a Black mom may feel like it never looked out for her at all.”

“Do not let them take away your power. Do not let them take away your democracy. Make a plan right now for how you are going to get involved and vote.”

I hope those disaffected folks were watching.