By Any Other Name…

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

This is how we treat immigrant children — hundreds and hundreds of immigrant children — in the America Donald Trump has made great again:

First we separate them from their parents, or whatever family member brought them in search of a better life. We pretend they are better off alone than staying with people who, if we can’t prove they are criminals now, we’ll get around to it.

By our own law, we put them in “safe and sanitary facilities,” like the one in Clint, Texas, visited last week by lawyers, doctors, and interpreters appalled by what they saw. Three hundred and fifty children were crammed into a detention center designed to hold no more than a hundred and four adults. Our benevolent government recently added a giant, windowless warehouse where we planned to keep five hundred more. Amazing what wonders we can accomplish when we treat people like roaches.

The observers told The New Yorker magazine they discovered untreated flu and lice outbreaks; children covered in filth inside and outside their clothing sleeping on cold concrete floors. Guards wore masks to protect themselves from the stench. Children as young as seven were the only caretakers for infants and toddlers they first met when guards handed them off saying, take care of these kids, will ya?

By our own law, we are to keep them there no more than seventy-two hours in this “temporary” housing. Children have been kept there for weeks.

Children wore shirts stained and wet with mucus, food, and breast milk — some of the children were mothers with children of their own.

As appalling as these conditions, was the brazen hubris of the government “caretakers.” Though they had been told three weeks in advance of the observers’ visit, children were unshowered, or had been allowed to shower only a day or two before the lawyers arrived. Toothbrushes were unavailable, and government lawyers later told incredulous judges toothbrushes and soap were unnecessary luxuries of “safe and sanitary facilities.”

It may not be fair to expect humane or caring treatment of this particular population of immigrant children, from this particular Administration.

By this Administration’s definition, if they are brown-skinned or black-skinned or any-skinned this side of Norway, they come from shithole countries and the dirty, shabby new holes we throw them into — while we decide how best to throw them back where they came from — are an upgrade for which they should be grateful.

An upstart Congresswoman of less than Norwegian complexion called places like this, concentration camps.

Government shills complain that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez implies (she doesn’t, but truth isn’t a player in this administration) that what they like to call summer camps are the same as Nazi concentration camps.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines a concentration camp as a “prison in which large numbers of nonmilitary prisoners are kept…in extremely poor conditions.”

These children are confined in large numbers and prevented from escaping. These children are not soldiers. Only a government lawyer could argue, and his face not crack, that these children are kept in anything but extremely poor conditions.

These are concentration camps.

But good for you, Mr. President, your concentration camps are better than the Nazis’. You don’t kill children by gas or oven; you kill or wound them by neglect and animus.

A half-dozen immigrant children yearning to breathe free American air have already stopped breathing altogether in our care under our President’s so-called watch.

How many deaths of these children will it take till Americans force him actually to open his eyes?