This week brings fresh waves of shock and outrage around the world in response to The Guardian‘s reporting on July 2 (“Texas migrant detention facilities ‘dangerously overcrowded'”) and follow-up reports and visits by elected officials and world leaders (“United Nations slams U.S. for detention facilities: ‘This should never happen anywhere,'” USA Today, July 9). The Trump administration, meanwhile, dismisses the claims (“Trump and His Aides Dismiss Reports of Disease and Hunger in Border Facilities,” The New York Times, July 7)
While immigration issues are complex, the right response to inhumane conditions imposed upon refugees is not complicated for people of conscience. We must actively resist the inhumane treatment of children and adults in detention. Seventy percent of those in detention are held in privately run, for-profit prisons. We call for the end of this corrupt system that harms the most vulnerable.
Allies for Immigration Justice and Women’s March SLO are co-sponsoring Lights for Liberty, for a peaceful protest and march that’s part of a nationwide vigil happening this week. Join us Saturday, July 13, from noon to 2 p.m., downtown SLO at the county courthouse lawn for speakers, musicians, and a march through town.
Mary Lynn Crandall, Solina Lindahl, Jan Meslin, Douglas Pillsbury, Gina Whitaker
Allies for Immigration Justice
This article appears in 55 Fiction 2019.
Resistance actions against Trumps (Putin) “concentration camps continue. New York City, San Francisco, and other liberal metropolitan areas have almost completely emptied out as liberals flock to the southern border to liberate the surviving prisoners. Conditions in the camps are now beyond inhuman. According to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,migrants are being forced to drink out of toilets, and otherwisesubjected to systematic cruelty,(so you can understand why liberals are physically putting their bodies on the line to bring an end to this horrifying sadism, and not just sitting around on the Internet shrieking about concentration camps as they travel to their summer holiday rentals in San Luis Obispo, or Cambria, or wherever). These Putin-Trump-Nazi concentration camps are nothing at all like the detention facilities the Obama administration operated,even though they look exactly the same. Sure, thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents, in cages, and there weretens of thousands of incidents of rape, sexual abuse, beatings, and so on, but otherwise these Obama detention facilities were more like great big 2-star hotels, or like student dorms at a state university, so there was no need for liberals to get all worked up and start comparing them to places like Dachau and Buchenwald. Plus, heresa picture of dead people! Look at this picture! These people are dead! So just shut up about Obama already! Enough with history, and critical thinking, and the practical aspects of immigration policy! Its time to abolish all national borders, issue everyone a U.S. passport, and transcend the whole concept of national sovereignty or at least to provide the capitalist ruling classes with an endless supply of cheap, undocumented, extremely compliant unskilled labor. Those Avila Beach lawns arent going to mow themselves!
WTF??????