Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Andrew Cuomo: A Moral Outrage New York Will Not Tolerate
The Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of immigrant children has left a dark stain on the history of our nation. It is a human tragedy and a threat to our values.
On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order rolling back his own policy of separating parents from their children — claiming to solve a problem that was of his own creation.
But this order is no solution at all. It still leaves open the long-term detention of immigrant children, which would clearly violate federal law.
Moreover, you can’t un-abuse the more than 2,300 children who have been separated from their parents at the border with the swipe of a pen. The administration’s family separation policy has already done potentially irreparable harm to those children who were used as pawns in the president’s political agenda. And the order includes no plan to reunite these children with their parents, something that should be done as quickly as possible. [..]
The mistreatment of children seeking refuge within our borders is a moral outrage and an affront to the teachings of every major religion. “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold,” it has been said, “is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”
New York will not remain silent. Our state has always served as a beacon of liberty and opportunity for the world, and the Lady of the Harbor holds her torch high not only to light the way for immigrants, but to light the way forward when our country is lost.
Charles M. Blow: The King and Queen of Cruelty
You just can’t construct prisons for babies. You can’t rip children from mothers and fathers. You can’t use the power of the American government to institute and oversee a program of state-sponsored child abuse. You can’t have a system where the process and possibility of reunification is murky and maybe futile.
You can’t do any of that and assume that decent people won’t rise up in revolt.
Donald Trump learned that this week as an avalanche of indignation came down on him and his administration for his brutal, inhumane “zero tolerance” policy at the border, which was resulting in the terrible suffering of children and their parents. [..]
It’s not that Trump and his family don’t understand the downside of imposing even the smallest amount of stress on children. It’s just that they value different children in differing degrees.
Melania Trump clearly thought that it was too traumatic to move the couple’s young son to Washington during the school year, so she stayed with him in New York, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars for security.
Jill Filipovic: Why Trump thinks domestic violence victims don’t deserve asylum
f there is one theme to the Trump administration’s immigration rules, largely crafted by Jeff Sessions and the White House policy adviser Stephen Miller, it is this: target the most vulnerable.
We saw that at play in the egregious policy, reversed on Wednesday after a public outcry, of separating children from their parents at the border, and warehousing them in cages where they cry for their parents. And we see it in a less-remarked-upon policy shift, too: Sessions’s directive to refuse grants of asylum to women fleeing domestic violence.
To hear Trump tell it, these increasingly authoritarian immigration rules are to protect Americans from the “bad hombres” coming across the border. And transnational gangs like MS-13 are a real threat and do real violence. It’s telling, though, that the Trump immigration policies don’t do anything to target these potentially dangerous men. Instead, they pick off the lowest-hanging fruit: women and children.
What else, other than out-and-out hostility and a desire to hurt the most vulnerable, justifies Sessions’s decision to remove asylum protections from women suffering violence at the hands of their partners? Well, there’s one other thing: misogyny, and the attendant lack of understanding of how domestic violence works.
Richard Wollfe: Trump’s cruel border policies created a needless crisis. It’s far from over
Was it the “tender age” inmates, the rare sight of all the Senate’s Republicans growing a spine, or the even rarer sight of intervention from every one of the nation’s first ladies?
We’ll never know the truth behind Donald Trump’s humiliating reversal of his own brutal policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border.
But we do know that Trump will lie about his actions, and will be utterly incompetent about fixing the crisis he created. [..]
Some people have suggested this crisis of Trump’s making is his own personal Katrina: the hurricane that laid bare the incompetence of the Bush administration.
It isn’t. That’s because there was Maria: another hurricane that killed three times more Americans than Katrina, because the incompetence was that much worse than anything we saw in New Orleans.
No, there are no recent American comparisons to the child cruelty of this man-child president. There’s only the permanent shame of a president and his willing aides who punished children because their parents wanted to give them a better life.
Richard E. Frankel: Trump Is Terrorizing Children
In recent days, millions of Americans have seen the shocking, heartbreaking images of children—crying, screaming, hysterical children—being ripped from the arms of their parents and sent away to a newly constructed camp in the Texas desert. So many of us have been justifiably outraged by the news. Here are children, arriving with their parents after a perilous journey, seeking asylum from the life-threatening conditions in their home countries, being terrorized by agents of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE). And all of it part of a deliberate policy implemented by Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, and Stephen Miller in their ongoing effort to re-build a white, Christian America through the exclusion (in this case through terror) of all those they deem to be outsiders.
Unfortunately, after the bloody twentieth century, it’s no surprise that man’s capacity for evil extends all the way to the violent assault on children—the most innocent and vulnerable among us. What does it mean, then, for a society to sink so low as to permit the forced separation of families whose only “crime” is seeking peace and freedom in America? What does it mean for a society to allow for a policy of violence against children? How could a country punish children for the decisions of their parents—decisions that, by any standard, are unimaginably difficult?
They are the kinds of impossible decisions Holocaust scholar Berel Lang has called “choiceless choices.” And looking back to the Holocaust and the decisions that Jews faced then, perhaps we can gain further insights as to why the current policy of the United States government is so unimaginably cruel.
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