We Are Governed by Monsters Now

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

15 December 18

The Trump administration's cruelty is not just deliberate. It is casual.

nimaginable. Except that, you know, it's not.

From The Washington Post:

According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m. Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in. More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders, who arrived soon after, measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

After a helicopter flight to Providence Children’s Hospital in El Paso, the child went into cardiac arrest and “was revived,” according to the agency. “However, the child did not recover and died at the hospital less than 24 hours after being transported,” CBP said. The agency did not release the name of the girl or her father, but the father remains in El Paso awaiting a meeting with Guatemalan consular officials, according to CBP. The agency is investigating the incident to ensure appropriate policies were followed, it said.

And before the inevitable trolling begins, as soon as this child was taken into the custody of the United States Border Patrol, she became its responsibility and nobody else's. At that point, it doesn't matter if she had walked here from Guatemala, or Guam, or Jupiter. Once she was in custody, the child's health and well-being became the responsibility of the United States government. It became the responsibility of the United States government to monitor her for any sign of exposure.

(Although it's very hard reading this story not to remember this video of Border Patrol officers pouring out water left in the desert for migrants by church groups.)

Back before he was exposed as not merely a big-hat-wearing fool, but a Russian dupe of a big-hat-wearing fool, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, an early and vociferous supporter of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago, allowed an inmate in his jail to die of thirst. We largely are rid of David Clarke from our politics, thank god, but apparently his philosophy of incarceration lives on.

This is cruel, but not unusual. The de facto policy of this administration* is to make the refugee experience so deadly as to discourage people from attempting to flee to this country. The de facto policy of this administration is to whiten the population of this country by any means necessary. (That's why a racist goon like Stephen Miller works in the White House, whereas, with any other president, he wouldn't be allowed within 100 miles of the District of Columbia.) This policy is general throughout the government. While this child was dying in custody, the folks over at ICE once again used her fellow refugees as bait, rounding up people who'd come forward to "sponsor" an immigrant child. As I said, cruel, but not unusual.

Article IX of the international Convention on the Rights of the Child which, in 1989, the U.S. government bravely signed, only to have the U.S. Senate bravely refuse to ratify it, pretty much spells out everything that's wrong with the current policy that has led to this child's death.

Article 9

1. States Parties shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities subject to judicial review determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child. Such determination may be necessary in a particular case such as one involving abuse or neglect of the child by the parents, or one where the parents are living separately and a decision must be made as to the child's place of residence.

2. In any proceedings pursuant to paragraph 1 of the present article, all interested parties shall be given an opportunity to participate in the proceedings and make their views known.

3. States Parties shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis, except if it is contrary to the child's best interests.

4. Where such separation results from any action initiated by a State Party, such as the detention, imprisonment, exile, deportation or death (including death arising from any cause while the person is in the custody of the State) of one or both parents or of the child, that State Party shall, upon request, provide the parents, the child or, if appropriate, another member of the family with the essential information concerning the whereabouts of the absent member(s) of the family unless the provision of the information would be detrimental to the well-being of the child. States Parties shall further ensure that the submission of such a request shall of itself entail no adverse consequences for the person(s) concerned.

No mention there of children who should die a slow death, alone amid strangers, because it is somehow, in someone's twisted mind, good public policy to allow it. The cruelty in this country's history has been this deliberate before, but rarely has it been this casual. We are governed by monsters now.

Naturally, this being Camp Runamuck and all, the blame-shifting has begun. On Friday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security and Misplaced Consonant Victim Kirstjen Nielsen took time off to visit Three Idiots on a Davenport, because that is the crucible of sophisticated discourse and high-level policy thought in this administration. She promptly blamed the child's family, because she is a monstrous cyborg whose soul is a bag of scorpions.

“What happened was they were about 90 miles away from where we could process them. They came in such a large crowd that it took our border patrol folks a couple times to get them all. We gave immediate care, we’ll continue to look into the situation, but again, I cannot stress enough how dangerous this journey is when migrants choose to come here illegally.”

She was in custody for over eight freaking hours before anyone did anything.

Monsters, all the way down.