General Discussion

niyad

(113,348 posts) Fri Jun 29, 2018, 02:11 PM Jun 2018

Hillary Clinton: 'What is more uncivil than taking children away?'

Hillary Clinton: 'What is more uncivil than taking children away?'

She has made peace with losing the election – but not with Donald Trump. Now she is fighting to undo the damage of the president’s child-separation policy – and has no time for debates over civility

?w=1125&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=07fe3eff68cd836f716e47c9f1c59ab5
Hillary Clinton … ‘I hoped I wouldn’t see the worst of my fears come true.’ Photograph: Harry Borden for the Guardian

When Hillary Clinton made her first public appearance after losing the 2016 election, it was her admission that she had felt like “never leaving the house again” that made headlines. Twenty months later, other details of the speech seem much more significant. That Clinton had left her house to address the Children’s Defense Fund, a child advocacy organisation, said a lot about where the defeated candidate saw her future. Her warning about “the little girl I met in Nevada who started to cry when she told me how scared she was that her parents would be taken away from her and be deported”, told us more about her country’s future than we knew. But when I quote her words back to her, it’s not the accuracy of her prescience that makes her shudder, but its inadequacy.

. . . .

Clinton has no doubt that Trump deployed the policy for the strategic purpose of making his wall look like a more palatable option. “He is playing to his base – and his base was attracted to him for a number of reasons, one of which was his anti-immigrant rhetoric. And that was exemplified by the wall. So the wall became more of a symbol than a real plan. He has now decided that he has to do whatever he can to get the wall, to satisfy the base. And I think,” she adds, “he has gone so far in that direction that he does things which are truly unimaginably cruel and unrelated to the outcome.” What does she mean by that? “I mean, you do not have to take children away from their parents to negotiate to get what you want on the wall. There are enough different strands in the immigration debate that he could give a little somewhere and try to get [something] in return, like you do in a democracy, in a political legislative process. But he has chosen instead to be very oppositional to anyone who criticises him, to be very intimidating to everyone in his own party by threatening to unleash his base against them. And so he has adopted these all-or-nothing positions.”

Trump called it off, Clinton believes, only because “even for him, the optics were terrible”, but she says that his executive order ending the policy has not even begun to solve the problem. “The question of how we reunite the children who were taken from the parents is the one that’s keeping me up at night.” Does she worry some may never be reunited? She looks stricken. “Yes, I do. Absolutely I worry about that. I’m worried that some children will not be reunited.”

Clinton’s expression grows increasingly bleak as she catalogues the bureaucratic chaos. For a start, many of the children are nonverbal; others don’t speak Spanish, but obscure Mayan languages. And all are confused and traumatised. Having been “funnelled through a whole panoply” of Homeland Security agencies notorious for “very poor record keeping and incompetence”, many of which are privately run, some babies have been transported all the way from the border to Detroit and New York. Others have gone to foster care families; some parents have already been deported without their children. “You just could not even imagine a worse child-welfare tragedy.”

. . . .
(oh,yeah, real dangerous job--big guns, little boy. FUCK anybody who defends this shit!!)

?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=47006a7f205d781c9c8f677d68df5855
A boy and his father from Honduras are taken into custody by US border agents near the US-Mexico Border on 12 June.
. . .

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/29/hillary-clinton-on-trumps-child-detention-policy-it-keeps-me-up-at-night