Opinion: Treating Children Worse Than Animals Is A Crime Against Humanity

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The Trump administration is treating children worse than animals and that is a crime against humanity.

Last week, we debated whether to refer to the for-profit facilities in which human beings are treated worse than dogs are concentration camps, detention centers or internment camps.

After reading the reports about conditions at those facilities; I’m more convinced they are concentration camps. The fact that companies are profiting from these facilities shows how morally bankrupt Trump and his administration is. The moral bankruptcy extends to FLOTUS Melania whose outward beauty is tarnished by her willingness and capacity to remain silent her husband shows his inner monster as people seeking asylum are subjected to worse conditions than criminals like Paul Manafort.

Per usual, the Republican crickets were chirping as news came out about the conditions that asylum seeking families are in. Treatable illnesses go untreated. Children with all sorts of bodily fluids caked on their soiled clothes. Children provide children with the care they can without soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste and edible food.

It’s such a contrast to the millions of dollars spent on Donald Trump’s golf trips and Melania’s spa days at Mar-a-Lago, their adult children’s constant vacations and the recent Trump family invasion at a state dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II.

As tempting as it may be to put the rottenest family in America in the conditions they deem good enough for children seeking asylum, we really are better than that – even if the Trumps are not.

I can’t believe that I need to a write a column spelling out why it’s wrong to put people in cages, or force them to sleep on the floor, or deprive them of clean clothing; baths, soap, toothbrushes or feed human beings food that’s rotten.

There are some people who will applaud this because they don’t see immigrants, especially when they are people of color, as human beings.
They seem immigrants as Trump portrays them.

Last Friday, Donald Trump revealed how pathological his hatred for people of color is when he refused to apologize for seeking the death penalty for the Central Park five – despite the fact they were exonerated.

The only voice to comment on the morally bankrupt conditions under which babies and children are being held by our government was that of Sarah Fabian, the DOJ lawyer who defended it in an American court in 2019.

How can this lawyer go before the court and argue that children don’t need soap, toothbrushes or a bed to sleep in? How can she claim the facilities are sanitary and safe when older children are caring for younger children because the maga state is neglecting them? How can anyone suggest that soap and toothbrushes aren’t necessary to being clean and safe- even if it’s “only” for one day. How can an officer of the court defend a facility in which children are caked in dirt, suffering from untreated illnesses and eating rotten food?

As reported by Associated Press, last week attorneys visited the Border Patrol station in Clint Texas. They found older children trying to take care of infants and toddlers. There was a children with matted hair who hadn’t showered for days. The lawyers saw children who were hungry, inconsolable and trying to comfort each other. Some of these children had been at that facility for three weeks.

Trump’s willing enablers in the border authority call these facilities dog pounds.

While the administration and Republican lawmakers were silent about the moral bankruptcy that makes keeping people in conditions like that possible; the drama was unending over Alexandra Ocasio Cortes calling those facilities concentration camps.

After reading the news reports about the facility in Texas, I’m more convinced that concentration camp is the appropriate term.

But, I’m not going to further belabor the point. The bigger issue is, while we’re discussing if they should be called concentration camps or something else, children are living in inhumane conditions and one of the political parties is silent. The first lady hasn’t so much as issued a statement in writing or on the back of a jacket. Ivanka Trump was nowhere to be found.

Ivanka Trump is an official advisor to the president and Melania Trump is often praised as one of Trump’s most trust, albeit, unofficial political advisors.

If these women are as strong, independent and influential as they are promoted to be, they should have been using their influence a year ago, when we found out children were put in cages. The conditions are getting worse as we learn about concentration camp like conditions and Trump is threatening mass deportation raids.

Their continuing silence makes them morally culpable.

But enough on this. This really is about children who are sick, hungry, frightened and living in conditions that we would deem unfit for any human, for any animals.

New reports say the children were moved to a new location – still in border control custody. So what does that mean? With this government you just know the priority is the kind of press they are getting – not the gut wrenching conditions with which they treat children. You know they’re worried about Trump’s public image – not the fact that most, if not all, of these children will be traumatized for years, decades, possibly the rest of their lives.

So this begs the questions, what conditions were they moved to? Are they better, or just out of the public eye?

Doe this mean someone will take care of them? Will they have clean clothes, soap, tooth bushes, toothpaste, beds and blankets? Will they finally be treated like human beings who did nothing wrong. They came to America to stay alive.
If you want to stop the flow of migrants, then help solve the problems at home. You don’t solve migration problems with hate speech and crimes against humanity.

One thing is certain. We cannot accept this. We cannot be silent. No matter how exhausted we may be or may become from all the outrage, we can never allow ourselves to let this be acceptable. And we can never normalize it with euphemisms and pearl-clutching over comparing advisor Steven Miller’s policies happily embraced by Trump to that of the Nazis before the Holocaust.