Trump/Pence Continues Its Brutal Treatment of Immigrant Children

One of the mysteries in politics is how the Republican Party continues to claim it is the party of "Christian values."  The same applies to evangelicals who continue to support a self-confessed serial adulterer and sexual molester.  Yet much of the main stream media never confronts the Republican lies much less the falsehoods and acceptance of evil by right wing religious "leaders" such as Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. - and many more - who are 100% on board with the GOP's anti-Gospel message policies.  Polls have shown that roughly half of evangelicals want Brett Kavanaugh confirmed even if he is guilty of the various allegations against him.  But nowhere is the moral bankruptcy of today's GOP and its base more telling than in the manner in which detained immigrant children are being treated.  Such treatment underscores the reality that to the GOP base - including the hypocrisy-filled evangelicals who fill church pews - only whites are human.  Everyone else is to be treated like animals.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the continued mistreatment of detained immigrant children.  Here are excerpts:

Migrant children separated from their parents at the border under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy have been subjected to harsh conditions in U.S. detention facilities, an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General found.

The report, obtained by The Washington Post, found at least 860 migrant children were held in Border Patrol holding cells longer than 72-hours, the maximum length of time mandated by the U.S. courts. One child was held for 12 days and another for 25.

The Border Patrol holding cells are notoriously torturous, earning the nickname of “hieleras,” or “ice box,” among the immigrants who have spent time in the frigid spaces with few — if any — blankets.

The holding cells were designed as a temporary stop for minors as they wait to be transferred to shelters run by Health and Human Services (HHS). Aside from their frigid temperatures, many of them also lack adequate beds, have zero shower facilities, and are essentially chain-link holding pens. Reports of harsh physical conditions were outlined in a court filing earlier this summer and based on interviews between immigration lawyers and detained children, about their time in the holding cells and contractor-run detention facilities for unaccompanied minors.

“There is no privacy. It is dirty and they don’t clean it,” a Guatemalan boy named Erick said, describing his first three days in Border Patrol custody. “The room is always cold. The guards took my sweater. I sleep on the floor. There are 3 mattresses, but the boys from Honduras have taken them.”

The DHS OIG report also describes just how poorly mismanaged the zero tolerance policy was — how it left parents with little-to-no information on their children’s whereabouts and no plan for how to reunite them.

DHS investigators discovered that officials shared minor’s files via Microsoft Word email attachments because the government’s internal systems were unstable. “Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report stated.

Border Patrol agents separated children who could not yet speak from their parents and did not provide wrist bracelets or any other form of identification to the children, nor were they ever fingerprinted or photographed to ensure they were linked to the correct case file. Though the abusive family separation practice was technically ended through executive order months ago — the Trump administration effectively reversed its own previous policy — hundreds of children remain separated from their parents, most of them deemed “ineligible for reunification by the federal government.” 136 children are still in custody, 3 of whom are under the age of 5. Many of their parents say they were deported before they could be reunited with their children, and some claim they were pressured to give up their right to reunification by officials who used English-only documents and confusing instructions.

Proud to be an American?  I am not - I am ashamed.  Next time you hear some Trump supporter pontificating and, worse yet, spreading misogyny, please throw this reality in their face.  If they support these policies, know for certain that they are NOT true Christians.  They are evil.