Heath Haussamen / NMPolitics.net
A scene from the U.S./Mexico border. In the foreground, behind a barbed-wire fence, U.S. Border Patrol agents speak with each other in El Paso, Texas. Across the Rio Grande, in the background, is Cuidad Juárez, Mexico.
COMMENTARY: Several U.S. presidents have called the United States a shining city on a hill – a reference to Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, telling his followers they were to be the light of the world.
A 1630 sermon by Puritan John Winthrop, which expressed a commitment to be a force for community, charity and justice in the world, made the phrase popular in American lore.
During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Mitt Romney warned that if Donald Trump were elected, the United States would cease being such a place.
It seems he was right.
Trump’s administration is using children as pawns in an effort to deter illegal immigration and asylum seeking. They’re separating children from their parents, flagrantly disregarding the trauma that causes kids, in an attempt to discourage other would-be immigrants from attempting to cross our border. “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them,” U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said.
Heath Haussamen
The on-the-ground reality that heartless attitude creates is stunning. One public defender recounted clients who told her the Border Patrol said, while taking their children, that they were going to give them baths. “As the hours passed, it dawned on the mothers the kids were not coming back,” the Boston Globe reported.
The New York Times reported on a 5-year-old boy from Honduras who, while in foster care, cried himself to sleep and clung to drawings of his family for dear life.
A Democratic congresswoman met with some detained immigrants. They said they were taken to be photographed and returned to find their children gone, The Times reported. Sometimes, the detainees heard their children screaming in nearby rooms.
A father took his own life after border agents forcibly took his 3-year-old son from his arms in Texas, the Washington Post reported.
As the investigative reporting outlet Searchlight New Mexico has recounted in recent articles, childhood trauma – formally called adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs – has dramatic and lifelong impacts. Literally hundreds of scientific studies link such trauma to diseases, mental illness and other problems. ACEs can impair learning and emotional regulation, undermine social functioning and even alter DNA.
ACEs “have lifelong harmful impacts on health and the human condition, potentially for generations to come,” Searchlight reported.
We call that generational trauma. It’s apparent today in the struggles of many Native Americans to overcome generations of government-imposed persecution – including the decades-long practice of forcibly removing Native children from their homes and placing them in Christian boarding schools to assimilate them. Children were forced to cut their hair, forbidden to speak their languages and given new names. Many were also subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse. Albuquerque is among the cities that housed such a place.
Have we not learned a goddamn thing?
Some will say Native American boarding schools were a well-intentioned effort to help children adapt and have better lives, even if in retrospect that system was morally wrong. Today, there’s no pretense that we’re somehow doing right by these immigrant children. Instead, we’ve sharpened the traumatization of kids into a weapon we’re now intentionally using in a very adult and geopolitical struggle.
It’s one thing to take a hardline approach to curbing illegal entry into the United States. It’s an entirely different thing to intentionally harm innocent children.
We’re inflicting trauma that will last generations. This is a crime against humanity – one that could only be carried out by a nation and a people who have become hardened by our own generational trauma.
The city on the hill is only shining because it’s being burned to the ground.
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.