One does not have to look very hard to learn the fate of the ordinary people of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and other nations who faced murderous right-wing police states armed with weapons made by U.S. manufacturers and financed by the U.S. Government.
And now the beleaguered citizens of these nations who fear for their lives and the lives of their families have come to this nation, hoping to be taken in and accepted by the very nation that is responsible for their suffering.
We have a moral obligation to offer them bread, not a stone[1]. Our moral duty to them goes far beyond the generally acknowledged obligation to treat others fairly and humanely. These are the very people we have wronged, and we can never fully atone for the evils we have visited upon them, either directly or by proxy.
Our president, Donald Trump, won the 2016 election partly by demonizing the very refugees we have created, and he has followed up by treating them even worse as they seek refuge in the U.S., to the extent of separating parents from their children. In many cases they will be permanently lost to each other, because ICE[2] neglected to keep track of which children belonged to which parents.
Why is it that tough, steely-eyed law enforcers seem to almost enjoy making children suffer? Why must it be children? Is it because they are so vulnerable that it’s easy to control them? It reminds me of Ivan’s conversation with his brother Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov about the cruelty of adults to children:
You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal[3],….Dear reader, the way ICE is treating these children is simply evil. The president’s allowing it to happen is perhaps even more evil, because he could have stopped it at any time. Now that he has ordered ICE to stop separating families, ICE is transporting over 2000 children previously separated to shelters all over the country without a thought of returning them to their parents. It’s inconceivable that a president would order this kind of treatment. Maybe you can now understand how little he and the ICE management are concerned with basic human rights when it involves people in their power.
Apparently, the Republicans are waking up, not to the cruelty of what is going on, but the risk to their reelection.
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Matthew 7:9 ↩
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Land closer than 50 miles to the U.S. border is, for all practical purposes, a Constitution-free zone, in which ICE agents, as well as other law enforcement agencies, have more or less a free hand to do what they please. Don’t expect to retain any of your constitutional rights if an agent suspects you of being an illegal immigrant inside the 50-mile-wide strip. ↩
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The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 4 “Rebellion.” The entire chapter is a gruesome recital by Ivan to his brother Alyosha, an Orthodox monk, of the way in which adults abuse children. The next chapter is Dostoevsky’s famous story, The Grand Inquisitor, which bears even closer reading. ↩
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