Making a killing off torture

I’ve been saying the camps holding refugee children are concentration camps. Leah McElrath takes it one more step. In a Twitter thread she links to a couple articles about the deplorable conditions in these camps. Then she adds:

When children die from the purposefully negligent conditions in these concentration camps, the camps will have become death camps.

Please understand:

Neglect can KILL young children — even if they have food & clean clothes. Babies and toddlers can die from a lack of nurturing.

PLEASE LISTEN:

Children dying from neglect in government facilities is NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE.

When one is willing to tolerate the purposeful neglect and abuse of infants and young children by the state, it’s not much further to being willing to tolerate their outright murder.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville discusses reports that children are being shifted from one concentration camp to a tent camp outside El Paso. McEwan notes several things wrong with this.

* This is not an improvement for the children. It will also be a concentration camp with the same deplorable conditions we’ve seen. Tents in the heat of a Texas summer will be deadly.

* This switch is to hide the deplorable treatment.

* The nasty guy administration does not have an effective tracking system to reunify parents and children. Much of what we know about the camps is because families raised hell. Move the children and the chance of reunification goes down. And if the families don’t know if their children are alive or dead it is harder for them to attempt to get some kind of accountability. Which is likely part of the point of the exercise.

Mikel Jollett tweeted this:

Just want to congratulate the New York Times for its wall-to-wall coverage of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Children without soap sleeping on concrete floors without blankets are very proud of all the clicks you got.

And this:

The US government is paying private businesses $775 per day to keep children in sub-human conditions. For that money, these kids could stay at the Hilton, eat from the buffet, and we’d still have millions to spare. Someone is making a KILLING off the torture of children.

Just to be perfectly clear: It wasn't an accident or the result of bureaucratic mismanagement.

The Republican Party spent way MORE taxpayer money to SEPARATE vulnerable children from their parents than it would have cost to keep the families together

Joyce Alene notes: “$775 a day doesn’t even cover a toothbrush, soap, and a bed.”

Samuel Sinyangwe notes the current tally of deaths in camps – 24 adults and 6 children – and tweeted a suggestion I like very much:

Put this on a massive sign overlooking the White House. And outside of every white Evangelical church in America.

Deborah Roseman tweeted a call for impeachment:

It's like we've been abused by a teacher, a doctor's exam has confirmed it, but our parents haven't pressed charges. And each day they don't, not only does it bruise our spirit, but it puts other kids at risk.

Imagine our parents saying "Let's just hope the students all give the teacher bad end-of-year reviews and maybe he won't be back for another school year"
…
I don't know who said it first, but even if a racist jury won't convict a cop who needlessly gunned down an unarmed black man, you file the charges. Impeachment is like that.

Another tweet by Roseman explains the current refugee experience:

Your house is on fire. You grab your child and run out. The neighbors there--you've never met, but they're upwind, maybe they'll let you in. You enter their gate. They lock you in the garage and send your kid away. Who knows where. Guess you shouldn't have trespassed.