Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
The tent city at a border crossing in Tornillo, Texas where immigrant children are being held.
COMMENTARY: I’m relieved that President Donald Trump has agreed to stop separating immigrant children from their parents.
But only a little relieved. Because there’s no plan to reunify the already-snatched children with their families. Because Trump now wants to detain immigrant families indefinitely while cases take months or years to be resolved. Because children are still being abused. Because asylum-seekers aren’t being treated appropriately.
And because I question whether the outrage over Trump’s intentional traumatization of kids sparked an awakening about the need to dismantle our oppressive systems, or whether this nation will return to thinking everything is OK.
Our troubling history weighed heavily on me as I looked upon the tent city housing immigrant children in Tornillo, Texas on Sunday. I felt shame as I watched boys play soccer.
Trump took kids from their parents, locked them up and let the world know we’ll do the same to other children. The cruel trauma he inflicted will last generations.
Heath Haussamen
While Trump is by far the most anti-immigrant president in my lifetime, he’s hardly the first to treat immigrants immorally. For example, Barack Obama wanted to indefinitely lock up children with adult family members as a deterrent. A court had to stop him.
These actions are symptoms of oppressive systems we’ve built over generations. While our economic and military policies contributed to destabilization and desperation in other nations, we built an economy at home that is dependent on undocumented workers. We looked the other way while they picked our fruits and vegetables, cleaned our restaurants and built our homes, because it made life more affordable for us.
Come they did – with their hopes and dreams, their resiliency, their children. In spite of Trump’s actions, many are still coming.
We simultaneously built a for-profit mass incarceration machine, aided and abetted most notably by Bill Clinton. Today that machine feeds wealthy prison, health care and social service industries that are influential at all levels of government. Budgets are dependent on filling jail beds. So are American jobs. Somebody has to go there.
The oligarchy profits greatly off oppression. It uses dark money to obfuscate and control by dehumanizing people. It ignites the lizard part of our brains to cause us to divide and fight.
The oligarchy wins, regardless of the outcome.
Meanwhile, we’ve punted on a partial solution – real immigration reform – until immigration has become the defining moral crisis of our era, the point at which many oppressive policies and systems intersect. The resulting devastation reveals that America hasn’t changed. We still prop up our way of life by abusing others.
We built this nation on the backs of black slaves and by committing genocide against Native Americans. We locked up innocent Japanese Americans during World War II. Our modern immigration laws are rooted in eugenics and white supremacy. Clearly, the systems and beliefs we as a nation have supported from our genesis are alive and well.
We’ve all enabled this, if not explicitly then with our tax dollars and votes – and, too often, with our silence. I’m ashamed of us.
It’s great to see many people waking up and acting. But standing up to Trump isn’t enough. He won’t be president forever.
Yes, we must keep fighting this president’s attempts to harm people. We must also acknowledge that every president in recent decades brought us closer to today. Going forward, we must fight with the same zeal and unity to dismantle oppressive systems and stop unjust actions by our government regardless of which political party is in charge. There’s lots of work ahead.
Heath Haussamen is NMPolitics.net’s editor and publisher. Agree with his opinion? Disagree? NMPolitics.net welcomes your views. Learn about submitting your own commentary here.