NEW COMIC TUESDAYS AND FRIDAYS AND WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES
I don't think it's possible for me to put into words or cartoons the outrage and anger I felt when I first saw the story in the tweets from reporter Jacob Soboroff about the Casa Padre facility where the U.S. is incarcerating migrant children. It's been quite a few years of outrageous and enraging developments here in America—from indefinite detention to drone strikes, from Trump's ascendance to abuse of migrants—but for some reason this went that one small step too far.
Since I can't describe or draw my feelings I took a step back to argue a little more cogently against the points brought up by the unfeeling assholes who see no problem with the way thus country treats the undocumented. Most importantly is the fact that crossing the border without papers is literally just a federal misdemeanor, and when I looked at list of federal misdemeanors I was struck by how paltry many of these crimes really are. And my fellow citizens are justifying the torture and abuse of children—because that's what this is—because, after all, these people broke the law.
I didn't get into it in the comic, either, but another detail: Illegal border crossings are getting less frequent, not more. This isn't even a growing problem we must address in some harsher way.
In the process of reading up on all this I found one of the more horrifyingly Orwellian phrases I've ever seen: The caging of children is one part of the Consequence Delivery System as formulated in 2011. So, yes, this started with Obama—although, really, all this "get tough on illegal immigration" crap goes back to Bill Clinton—and has been building up over years. It's only now that white people are noticing.
I recommend the full report because you can see the Border Patrol agitating for what Trump's been giving them: "Because families and children are excluded from the more severe consequences (under U.S. law or other policies), the Border Patrol's ability to deter these increasingly significant groups is limited."
"When people show you who they are, believe them the first time." Maya Angelou
