“Trump’s abhorrent family separation policy now has a death toll”

Very urgent matter.  The death toll is adding up.  

Read here about 39-year-old Honduran Marco Antonio Muñoz, 19-year-old Claudia Patricia Gómez González, and  19-year-old Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco who are all dead as a result of this administration's draconian anti-immigration policy.  AVEF's Frank Sharry aptly states:

"Trump, Sessions and Nielsen have blood on their hands. This is their crackdown. They can dial it back whenever they choose. But they won’t, because they believe in their divisive and dehumanizing strategy and they believe it will help them hang onto power. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress to stay silent, and the death toll mounts.”

We must oppose this in every way possible  Please reach out to whoever represents you in Congress and urge them to institute humane, comprehensive immigration reform.  Go to this link to see who represents you and reach out ASAP.

Angela Valenzuela

For Immediate Release     Contact: Michael Earls at 202-494-8555 or press@americasvoice.org

June 11, 2018

 

“Trump’s abhorrent family separation policy now has a death toll”

Tragedy Strikes and Outrage Mounts Over the Trump Administration’s Cruelty

Link: http://bit.ly/2HEzDts

 

Washington, DC – Over the weekend, Nick Miroff of the Washington Post reported on the devastating story of Marco Antonio Muñoz, a Honduran father who was evidently so distraught about being separated from his wife and child as a result of the Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” strategy, he committed suicide while in detention:

 

Much of the controversy generated by the approach has centered on its potentially traumatic impact for migrant children, but the government has said little about how it handles parents who become mentally unstable or violent after authorities split up their families.

Soon after Muñoz and his family were taken into custody, they arrived at a processing station in nearby McAllen and said they wanted to apply for asylum. Border Patrol agents told the family they would be separated. That’s when Muñoz “lost it,” according to one agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the incident.

“The guy lost his s---,” the agent said. “They had to use physical force to take the child out of his hands.”

Though Muñoz did not attempt to assault Border Patrol staff, he was at that point considered to be “pre-assault” because he was so agitated. As one agent described it, Muñoz “had the look of a guy at a bar who wanted to fight someone.”

“We had to get him out,” the agent said. “Those cells are about as secure as a dog kennel. He could have hurt someone.”

“He yelled and kicked at the windows on the ride to the jail,” an agent said. Shackled and handcuffed, Muñoz attempted to escape again upon arrival and once more had to be restrained.

Guards said they checked on Muñoz every 30 minutes and observed him praying in a corner of his cell the following morning.

Paramedics found Muñoz dead, his electrocardiogram showing a “flat line,” according to the report. The sheriff’s department said it attempted to contact Honduran authorities who could reclaim Muñoz’s body, but they received no answer at a consulate. Muñoz’s wife and son were later released from Border Patrol custody, according to one agent.

 

As journalist Jamil Smith tweeted:

 

“Donald Trump’s abhorrent family separation policy now has a death toll. Marco Antonio Muñoz, a Honduran father jailed apart from his wife and child, died from suicide inside a padded cell in Texas. This isn’t just affecting the kids.”

 

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch writes a blistering column entitled, “'Never Again'? 'Again' is Happening Right Now on America's Border. What Will You Do?” He writes of the growing number of young people now dead because of the Trump administration’ crackdown:

 

I want to write today about a suicide that has profound moral implications for what it means to be an American in 2018. And no, I’m not talking about either Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain...This is about Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old Honduran who died all alone last month in a rural Texas jail cell, with an item of clothing around his neck and a small pool of blood on a padded floor.

 

Muñoz was a casualty of the Trump administration’s cruel and inhuman “zero tolerance” policies ... the Munoz family asked for asylum in the nation that once celebrated its willingness to accept the tired, poor and hungry of the world. But that was a different century. This is 2018, and agents instead violently ripped the toddler out of the arms of a screaming Muñoz.

 

People are dying.

 

Claudia Patricia Gómez González is dead. A vivacious-looking 19-year-old woman who’d studied accounting and journeyed 1,500 miles north when she was unable to find work at home, Gonzáles was shot by a Border Patrol agent just north of the Texas border with Mexico last month.

 

Manuel Antonio Cano Pacheco is dead. He was the same age as González. His parents had brought him to a stable life in Iowa when he was only 3. Like most 19-year-olds, he made some mistakes — marijuana and driving offenses. That brought him to the attention of America’s stepped-up deportation forces, who stripped Pacheco — a teen dad, about to graduate high school — of his “Dreamer” status and took him across the border from Laredo, Texas, into Mexico, the “homeland” he’d never known. He was killed by drug gangs there just three weeks later.

 

We’ve done the right thing in teaching our children (and hopefully ourselves) to say, “Never again.” But we have to understand that “again” won’t come with a big bang and a giant sign that says “Human Rights Disaster!” Instead, it comes with these small but accelerating official acts of cruelty until the train is going too fast to stop — and with too many people too afraid to take the very real risk of speaking out to stop it.

 

...With Father’s Day looming … start the planning for a more active resistance of Trump’s inhumane policies. Because I can already hear that train coming down the tracks, and it’s only gaining steam.

 

According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice Education Fund:

 

“A father goes crazy when US government agents ‘use physical force’ to separate him from the wife and child he pledged to protect. Isolated in a padded cell, he kills himself in a jail in Texas. A young woman seeking a better life in America crosses the border and gets shot in the head and killed by a Border Patrol agent – for no apparent reason. A Dreamer gets sent back to Mexico, a country he can’t remember, ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and gets murdered by gangsters. This is not normal. Trump, Sessions and Nielsen have blood on their hands. This is their crackdown. They can dial it back whenever they choose. But they won’t, because they believe in their divisive and dehumanizing strategy and they believe it will help them hang onto power. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress to stay silent, and the death toll mounts.”

 

Follow Frank Sharry and America’s Voice Education Fund on Twitter: @FrankSharry and @AmericasVoice

America's Voice Education Fund – Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform

 

www.americasvoice.org

 

###

America's Voice, 1250 I St NW, Suite 1003, Washington, DC 20005 United States

‘Barbaric’: America’s cruel history of separating children from their parents

Important, if painful, read which is germane to what is happening right now on the U.S.-Mexico border.  Yes, our current policy of separating children from parents is barbaric.

I got this from AmericasVoice.org—a very helpful website, by the way.  Here is what they had to say about it:

ICYMI from WaPo: “‘Barbaric’: America’s Cruel History of Separating Children from Their Parents”

Link: http://bit.ly/2svFf3y

Washington, DC – In a new must-read, Washington Post’s DeNeen Brown connects the forced separation of African American children from their parents during slavery to strip them of their dignity and the forced separation of Native American children from their parents to strip them of their culture to the forced separation of immigrant children from their parents in order to strip them of their humanity. The piece is centered on analysis by Henry Fernandez of the African American Research Collaborative and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Below is an excerpt:

The Trump administration’s current crackdown on families that cross the border illegally has led to hundreds of children, some as young as 18 months, being separated from their parents. The parents are being sent to federal jails to face criminal prosecution while their children are being placed in shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services. Often, the children have no idea where their parents are or when they will see them again.

The policy has generated outrage among Democrats and immigration advocates. And it has conjured memories of some of the ugliest chapters in American history.

“Official US policy,” tweeted the African American Research Collaborative over the weekend. “Until 1865, rip African American children from their parents. From 1870s to 1970s, rip Native American children from their parents. Now, rip children of immigrants and refugees from their parents.”

Henry Fernandez, co-founder of the collaborative and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said he drafted the tweet based on his research into several periods in U.S. history when government officials sanctioned the separation of children from their parents, including during slavery.

Another period of family cruelty, Fernandez said, began in the late 1800s and lasted well into the 1970s, when indigenous children across the country were forcibly separated from their families and sent to “Indian schools.” At the boarding schools, the children were required to assimilate. They were stripped of their language and culture. Often they were physically and sometimes sexually abused.

“In each case, we look back at the programs as barbaric,” Fernandez said. “History will similarly consider the Trump administration’s ripping children from their parents as an unconscionably evil government action.”

….Each of these U.S. policies, Fernandez said, begins with the assumption “that the idea of family is simply less important to people of color and that the people involved are less than human. To justify ripping families apart, the government must first engage in dehumanizing the targeted group, whether it is Native Americans, African Americans or immigrants from Central America fleeing murder, rape, extortion and kidnapping.”

Trump, he noted, dehumanized immigrant children by saying, “ ‘They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.’ ”

“There is no question these children are innocent,” Fernandez said, “but Trump associates them with the idea that these are not like your children and thus less than human.”

The entire piece is worth the read and available online here.

-Angela

#FreeOurFamilies

Schenkkan's "Building the Wall" and the Middleman Minority Phenomenon

This Robert Schenkkan play, "Building the Wall," just got this rave review by theater critic Charles McNulty (see below) in the Los Angeles Times.  It appears to be captivating folks across the country by imagining the absolute worst in a dystopian portrayal of extreme, morally wrong immigration policy that showed recently in Los Angeles.

It shows in Austin at the University of Texas between Aug. 30-Sept. 10th. You can get pertinent information and a link to tickets here.

From what I can gather, the play sounds like a vivid nightmare I once had my first year in college.  I had been reading and learning about the horrific Japanese internment experience here in the U.S. and I dreamed that the government would do to us Mexicans what it did to the Japanese.   

The already tens of thousands experiencing roundups and deportations have already been living this nightmare—and with a ferociousness against Mexican immigrants. But my dream and this play is about everybody else, including people like myself who literally don't have anywhere else "to go back to."   I encourage you to read Dr. Roberto Rodriguez, in his Diverse Issues in Higher Education piece titled, "Mexican American or Mexican Mexicano?" It addresses the complexities of citizenship—actually, second-class citizenship—for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and people of color, generally.

As Mexicans and Mexican Americans, we are not only home, but in our ancestral home as Tejan@s in Texas and in the Southwest, generally.  Even if our genes traveled around the globe, our people never left the continent.  We have always been here.  We supersede the very notion of "citizenship" itself, a modern construct, like "nation-state," "border," "Texas," "United States," and "race."

I gather that "Building the Wall" is a good play for considering the oppressor-oppressed relationship, both its psychology and the role of what scholarship and theorizing in sociology refers to as the "middleman [sic] minority" phenomenon. These are the colonized, minority "agents of empire," that further function symbolically to legitimate it.  Structurally, as the middle people in a class and racial hierarchy, they have a stake in the existing arrangementas direct beneficiaries.  A psychological aspect of this is termed in scholarship as either "internalized racism" or "internalized oppression" that I have written about in my own work.  

Internalized oppression occurs when minority group members come to adopt and hold those same prejudices and attitudes that the dominant group holds toward their own group to the point that they despise the "Mexican-ness" within themselves.  They drink the Kool-Aid.  They buy into the pejorative, socially-constructed myths about them, their people, and their kind. 

McNulty and the play itself wants us to consider the slippery policy slope that plummets us into a dark, immoral abyss that threatens an ultimately self-destructive cultural shift to "a banality of evil," as the late philosopher Hannah Arendt hypothesized in her controversial book, widely regarded as a journalistic triumph, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Two more related reflections.  First, I saw the War for the Planet of the Apes (2017 film) recently and "Donkey," himself a "colonized ape," becomes a brutal oppressor, doing humans' bidding toward other apes held in captivity.  And my how he oppresses them with impunity! 

Cesar, the apes’ beloved leader, openly wonders what, if anything, may be “left to save” with the likes of Donkey should the liberation of all apes occur. After all, Donkey shares a deep investment along with the dominant group in the current societal arrangements that further constructs Cesar and his "ilk" as "radicals" and "troublemakers."

I'll not give any more of this movie away that I encourage you to see, but Donkey is a perfect example of the oppressor, middleman minority.  What's important to remember here is that these are ordinary, bureaucratic roles within an otherwise highly-stratified, hierarchy and occupational structure.  In a sense, Donkey was "better off" than the rest, but his status was equally tenuous relative to his imprisoned counterparts in the long shadow of what is arguably a "bureaucracy of genocide," in Arendt's view (e.g.,  (see Bilsky, 2015).  Second, I am reading the famous text authored by Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning in Spanish (El Hombre en Busca De Sentido).  He comments on the middlemen minorities there that he refers to as the “Kapos” at Auschwitz and other camps who carried out the Nazi's genocidal work in exchange for unlimited alcohol and saving their own skins, at least for awhile…  The parallels in all of this are striking and so I had to share.  I would like to see this provocative play when it comes to UT.  It already offers a lot of food for thought.


Angela Valenzuela

c/s

Review Robert Schenkkan's 'Building the Wall,' set in Trump's America, imagines the unimaginable


Charles McNulty / May 20, 2017Theater Critic

How does darkness overtake a nation? The philosopher Hannah Arendt took up the subject in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which investigated the mystery of how ordinary Germans transformed into murderous Nazis.

The face of evil, Arendt discovered, wasn’t a demon lurking in the cellar but the factory supervisor in the nice house across the street. Those carrying out the orders that led to the extermination of millions of Jews along with other marginalized groups became part of the bureaucracy of genocide. This startling and still controversial insight — that the Holocaust was executed not by sadists but by conformist clerks and self-interested middle managers — inspired the famous subtitle of Arendt’s book: “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“The Kentucky Cycle”) who co-wrote the screenplay for “Hacksaw Ridge,” has a new play that explores the concept of the banality of evil in our own backyard. “Building the Wall,” which opened Saturday at the Fountain Theatre, imagines the unimaginable happening in Trump’s America.

In a program note, Schenkkan acknowledges a debt to Gitta Sereny’s “Into That Darkness.” He describes her book as “an attempt to understand the bleakest of the Nazi horrors by focusing on one ordinary man who, for a brief moment, found himself with unlimited power.”

The parallels with “Building the Wall” are clear, but the play was written expressly in response to what Schenkkan sees as the threats posed by Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and his reopening of the “authoritarian playbook,” which calls for the creation of “a constant state of crisis” and the scapegoating of “minorities with appeals to nationalism, racism and isolationism.”

The crisis in the background of this two-character play, directed with unflagging concentration by Michael Michetti, is an incident in Times Square that “irradiated” two square blocks and allowed Trump to impose martial law. The year is 2019, but “near future” might be a more accurate delineation for this terrifyingly plausible work of dystopian fiction.

Bo Foxworth, who appeared in last fall’s South Coast Repertory production of “All the Way,” Schenkkan’s Tony Award-winning drama about Lyndon B. Johnson, plays Rick, the supervisor of a private prison who has been arrested and placed in solitary confinement for crimes that take some time to be revealed. Judith Moreland portrays Gloria, an African American history professor who talks with Rick in a chilly prison meeting room (conjured in all its generic menace by set designer Se Oh). She wants to understand what motivated his actions, and in return she’ll give him an opportunity to tell his side of the story.

The play, which arrives at the Fountain in the first stop in a series of productions set to open across the country as part of the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program, unfolds as a conversation between a liberal professor who happens to be a black woman and a Trump supporter who can’t understand why white Christians can’t defend their identity too. The two sniff each other out, challenging ideological assumptions while finding unexpected points of connection, but Schenkkan is less interested in the psychological dance between these characters than in the events that put Rick behind bars.

It may not seem entirely credible that Rick would divulge to a stranger with antithetical political views the dark secrets he tried to keep from his wife, but Schenkkan’s writing rarely hits a false note. Rick’s confession, centering on the detention of immigrants whose legal status is in dispute, builds steadily to a terrifying climax.

The play connects the violent sentiments of political rallies with policies that find an opportunity when chaos strikes the nation. The ratcheting up of the war against terrorism permits the rounding up of immigrants, which leads to the practical problem of how to hold a swelling population that can’t entirely be repatriated. Rick, in charge of one of the detention centers, is beset with managerial problems that become human catastrophes. Harrowing descriptions of the sanitation emergency are soon eclipsed by the graphic misery of the cholera epidemic that breaks out.

The situation only degenerates from there. Step by step, Schenkkan gets us to see the way the collapse of institutions leads to the collapse of morality and the rule of law. “Building the Wall” conjures what appears to be a worst-case scenario, though who would dare presume to know what the worst-case scenario even is anymore?

The acting in this 90-minute, intermission-less production is scrupulously well observed. Moreland, delivering a magnificent performance, finds subtle ways to convey the weight of Gloria’s conscience. The character is obviously a first-class academic, but she’s hardly dispassionate. Her experience as a target of hateful prejudice informs her research.

More to the dramatic point, the depth of Gloria’s responsiveness helps her to understand political views diametrically opposed to her own. She may wince at the faults in Rick’s reasoning, but she recognizes his alienation and powerlessness.

Foxworth neither sentimentalizes nor demonizes Rick, who recounts with blasted neutrality the path from his hardscrabble youth as military brat to his patriotic enlisting in the Army after Sept. 11 to his seduction as a veteran by Trump’s law-and-order message.

Rick isn’t by nature a bad man, but that doesn’t exculpate him of the atrocities committed on his watch. As a character, he may be the incarnation of an idea in a carefully arranged dramatic argument, but Foxworth personalizes the figure just enough for us to believe in his existence — and to wonder about the extent of his complicity.

“Building the Wall,” which would benefit from a touch more variety in the writing, stays on top of the headlines with mentions of Trump’s blocked travel bans and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ favorable stand on federal use of private prisons. Schenkkan will likely have to do some tinkering to keep the play up to date in future productions. But there’s no denying that this dramatic object lesson is expertly laid out.

Even a lapse at the end into rhetoric, when Rick incongruously stutters into academic speech (“What is a wall? It’s a, a construct, a, a device, for keeping people out”), cannot mar the effectiveness of this expedited theatrical construction. “Building the Wall” should be seen and shuddered over, if only to heighten our collective vigilance.

The theater historically has provided a forum for citizens to contemplate the agonizing issues of the day, and it’s heartening to see Schenkkan and the Fountain respond with such celerity to present dangers.

Copyright © 2017, Los Angeles Times