The Black Gate is closed by @BloggersRUs

The Black Gate is closed

by Tom Sullivan

People don't vote their interests. They vote their identities. That conclusion was a key takeaway from inhaling George Lakoff's "Moral Politics" one weekend. Now America faces an identity crisis.

The outrage and opprobrium directed at the Trump administration this week is not about its policy of separating small children from their families at the border. It is about what that policy (and his others) says about us as a people that our government would use anguish as a weapon against innocent children. Not unseen half a world away either, but on our doorstep.

The Trump-spawned identity crisis is about whether we are the people we think we are or something darker and crueler. Americans, most anyway, do not like what they see of themselves reflected in the images, sounds and stories from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Getty photographer John Moore has shared the story behind a viral photo taken during his recent ride-along with the Border Patrol https://t.co/voAxTpqwD3 pic.twitter.com/1rGogLMMHS

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 18, 2018
Richard Cohen wonders in a Washington Post op-ed whether the images from the border have already lost the midterm elections for Republicans and cost Donald Trump the 2020 election. The viral image John Moore (Getty Images) captured of a crying 2-year-old girl at the southern border has defined the cruel, dark heart of Trumpism, damaging his already tarnished brand the way the photo did of President George W. Bush peering out the window of Air Force One at the Hurricane Katrina devastation. The indellible 1972 image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc, burned and naked, fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam, defined the toll the Vietnam War was taking on civilians. Is this who we are? Moore's image again raises that question.

President Donald Trump, senior advisor Stephen Miller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have no plan for reuniting the families their "zero tolerance" policy has torn asunder. Their goal is to send a message to would-be immigrants that they are unwelcome here. The Black Gate is closed.

Jonathan Blitzer at the New Yorker follows Emily Kephart of the immigrant-rights group Kids in Need of Defense as she hunted for a six-year-old Guatemalan girl separated from her father at the border.

"No protocols have been put in place for keeping track of parents and children concurrently, for keeping parents and children in contact with each other while they are separated, or for eventually reuniting them," he writes. Immigration lawyers, public defenders, and immigrant advocates have tried to do the job in their place.

Kephart tracked the girl from U.S. facility to her family's village following clues:
Erik Hanshew, a federal public defender in El Paso, told me that the problems begin at the moment of arrest. “Our client gets arrested with his or her child out in the field. Sometimes they go together at the initial processing, sometimes they get separated right then and there for separate processing,” he said. “When we ask the Border Patrol agents at detention hearings a few days after physical arrest about the information they’ve obtained in their investigation, they tell us that the only thing they know is that the person arrested was with a kid. They don’t seem to know gender, age, or name.”

Jennifer Podkul, who is the policy director of Kids in Need of Defense, told me that advocates are trying to piece together information about the whereabouts of children based on the federal charging documents used in the parent’s immigration case. “You can try to figure out where and when the child was apprehended based on that,” she said. “But where the child is being held often has nothing to do with where she and her parent were arrested. The kids get moved around to different facilities.”
“I have a master’s degree, and I’m fluent in English,” Kephart says. And resolving a single case can take her days.

No protocols are in place for keeping track of which child goes with which detainee or where they end up or for reuniting families because once Trump & Co. have separated parent from child, it's "Deterrence Accomplished." No need to worry about a few dead-enders.

What America is witnessing in the human tragedy occurring on the southern border is this is what Trump's base wanted. This is their identity. It is what they voted for. The Trump administration will not go to the mat to build a country defined by e pluribus unum, one that lifts Liberty's lamp beside a metaphorical golden door flung wide. But it will to placate this guy:

‘We built these streets! White men built these streets.’ — This man was arrested after going on a racist rant against a Black stranger in Seattle pic.twitter.com/S41jXJtyrS

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) June 19, 2018
Trump will deliver for the White House propaganda arm:

Laura Ingraham defends the incarceration of children because the kids could be "fresh recruits" for MS-13 pic.twitter.com/NcJrNZT1Zq

— Brian Tashman (@briantashman) June 19, 2018
Josh Marshall tweets, "It’s basically the kind of racialist dehumanizing you hear before mass atrocities are committed. “They look innocent. But if they grow up they could slit your throat in the night.”

Your classic "Nits make lice" justification. Is this who we are?

Finally, this from AFP:

A US State Department background briefer today condemned Russia's "Soviet practice" of separating parents from their children. pic.twitter.com/w6WjNBCeUG

— Dave Clark (@DaveClark_AFP) June 18, 2018
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, think how flattered Vladimir Putin must be right now. Maybe enough to let Donald build that Moscow hotel.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.