From mass human rights violations to crimes against humanity

After playing a bell concert this afternoon I was hoping for a quiet evening of not thinking very hard. But before settling in to doing not much I read a bit of Sarah Kenzsior’s Twitter stream. Get a bit of news from the day, even if it is of the nasty guy.

There went the evening of not thinking very hard.

I followed a link or two and came to a Twitter thread from Elizabeth C. McLaughlin written a couple days ago. She’s an attorney and the CEO of Gaia Project Consulting.

She had been talking to a friend who is a legal volunteer inside Border Patrol facilities. This friend says the nasty guy is violating every basic human right.

A couple days ago I had mentioned a facility described as a “dog pound.” There is no protection from the elements, no baby food so mothers have to try to resume nursing, no running water. Everyone is sick.

Those that leave the dog pound are taken to the freezer, where it is intentionally kept at 55 degrees, which isn’t healthy, especially if your clothes are wet from the heat of outdoors. There are no beds. People are kept there for weeks.

From the freezer people are supposed to be taken to ICE facilities that are designed for residential care with beds, food, and bathrooms. (I would have thought refugees would be taken to this facility first and there wouldn’t be the dog pound or the freezer.)

But these facilities are empty and are being shut down.

Instead, refugees are being taken to military installations, such as Fort Sill, which had been a Japanese internment camp in WWII. Why?

Because Fort Sill and its counterparts are under the Department of Defense. And under the DoD refugees can be treated as prisoners of war, treated as enemies. Also under the DoD, unlike under ICE, the military can deny access. No media. No oversight. No lawyers. No human rights monitors. The camps would be declared protected airspace, so no drones flying over taking pictures of what’s inside. The nasty guy administration can do as it pleases with those inside.

Even before Fort Sill is set up and running, there are already atrocities in Border Patrol facilities. Denial of food, shelter, clothes, toilets, beds, and medicine. Agents refer to refugees as “bodies.” Not people or humans.

Soon we’ll be shifting from mass human rights violations to crimes against humanity.

Tell your senators and representatives.

In a second thread McLaughlin wrote today:

If US concentration camps at the border won't force @SpeakerPelosi to impeach, nothing will. That makes her a soulless, complicit enabler. No Democrat will forget this in 2020. We will primary every single elected official who supports her.

People, there is no “grand plan.” I have first hand intel on this straight off the Hill TODAY. There is nothing whatsoever divisive about telling the truth. You want things to change you have to be willing to put actual human lives above “unity.”

In a third tweet McLaughlin wrote:

The long-term purpose of the President and his people relentlessly lying, shouting "fake news," and gaslighting us:

Eventually, we won't believe the evidence of their atrocities, even when it's right in front of us.

Some of us are doubting it right now.

That's the point.

And in a fourth tweet McLaughlin shared a diagram of the various types of border facilities – Customs and Border Patrol Outpost, CBP Processing Facility, Office of Refugee Resettlement Facility, ICE Residential Facility, and Military Concentration Camp. The diagram also shows what conditions are like in each type of facility. Except for the ICE facilities (which are being shut down), life inside is horrific.



Dan Shafer linked to an article from the L.A.Times (looks like the one I mentioned before) with the headline, “Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps.” Then Shafer tweeted:

It’s pretty mindblowing that the main question driving the national media conversation right now is anything other than, “why does America have concentration camps now?”

Marco Rogers, a black man, replied to Shafer.

But the real lesson white folks should be learning is that your history is a lie. America has always done this. What's happening now is part of a long American tradition of saying one thing while doing another.

Again, the point of this is not to say that what's happening now is okay. The point is to help people move past the "shocked and appalled" phase of their reaction to what's happening. We need more people to accept that this is real and move to the militant rage phase.

With this post I’ve now written more posts about the nasty guy in four years (since he announced his candidacy in 2015) that I wrote about President Obama in nine years.