Donald Trump’s kids in cages scandal is even more horrifying than we knew
If the Trump administration accuses the Democrats of doing something, it means they’ve probably done it themselves. If they deny it, they’ve almost certainly done it. If they admit to it, it’s even worse than you’ve been led to believe. The Trump administration initially lied about separating families, with the excuse that they were simply following orders from a previous administration – though it’s been unclear if they’re referring to the policies of Presidents Obama, Bush 43 or Clinton – in other words, deflecting with lies and not caring where they point. As time drags on, we’ve found that the number of children separated is much higher than originally thought – some even forced into adoption. There are also the tragic deaths of children in U.S. custody, as reports reveal the conditions are even worse than we had feared.
Part of the reason the federal government has tried the excuse that there’s too many separated children and parents, is because they are now using secret shelters to detain migrant children. One of them, located in Ada, Oklahoma, has a reputation for sexual harassment and physical abuse among its staff – and is known to be holding at least one migrant child. A report from two years ago singled out this particular facility for having a staff with no medical training.
Even more alarming is that the attorneys of these children don’t even know how to find them – or how many even exist. There are at least five in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia, according to Reveal News. Beyond asking how this can be fixed, we must also ask if the number of separated families is so large because the Trump administration sought to profit off of this as much as possible?
People often compare this age to the beginning of the Holocaust. But it could be something else – echoes of our own dark past – our treatment of Native Americans that is all too often glossed over in schools, or the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, which is also rarely embellished, and was routinely upheld by courts in its day. Media companies owe it to their country to put their resources into investigating this matter thoroughly from the ground up. This is hardly the beginning of another shameful chapter in American history. We’re several steps along the way.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making