The news this week was depressing and outrageous. I kept reading stories I would never have made up.
As an example, there was the 3-year-old girl who was taken from her grandmother and held by border officials for 47 days, and that’s not the part that floored me. That part is just what I’ve come to expect.
The part that floored me was when Slate reported that under questioning at a Judiciary Committee hearing it was learned that the “Chief of Law Enforcement Operations for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Brian S. Hastings still isn’t sure if [the 3-year old] posed a threat.”
In 47 days, they could not assess a 3 year old’s threat to our nation’s security to the satisfaction of CBP’s Chief of Law Enforcement Operations. What kind of crackerjack border security do we have here?
Let’s think about this: What national security threat might a 3 year old represent?
Well, there’s always the possibility of exploding pants. But in 47 days it should be possible to determine whether the pants are equipped with explosives and, if so, to remove and neutralize them.
The toddler could be a spy, cleverly brought in to the country precisely to trick the CBP into taking her, so she could spy on top-secret crackerjack operations of the CBP itself. She’s wired and has a miniature camera, and she’s been filming our secret bozos.
Again, in 47 days it should have been easy to relieve her of the equipment. That means she’d have to commit everything to memory. She’s a prodigy. We need to keep her here and try and turn her to our side.
The CBP is literally kidnapping children and trying to tell us it’s for our own good, because the children might pose threats to national security.
Over a year ago we read that one of the kidnapping techniques the CBP has used was to tell parents they were just taking the children temporarily to give them baths, and they’d be right back with them. And then they wouldn’t bring them back.
Now we have cases where kids are taken from their parents, and they don’t even get baths while they are held. Then, eventually, after weeks, the children and the parents are separately deported with no effort to reunify them.
In the plain words of Chief Hastings, “we do the deportations” but “we don’t do the reunifications.” He implied that the reunification was up to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
I’m really trying hard to figure out how any one person or government agency could ever manage to be that irresponsible. They do the deportations. HHS doesn’t do them; CBP does them. OK? They deport the children and the parents separately. They don’t deport them on the same day, they don’t even deport them from the same city, or even necessarily send them to the same countries, and by all accounts they don’t keep track of who is sent where, and they above all don’t bother to remember which kid belongs to which parents.
HHS has nothing to do with all that, but they’re supposed to magically reunite the families after the CBP has split them up and put them on foreign soil?
Can I have some of what these guys are smoking?
Speaking of smoking el tabaco loco: Liz Cheney.
When I first read this I thought it was fake news. It was too clueless by miles:
When grizzlies were taken off the endangered species list in 2017, conservation groups and Native American tribes joined forces and sued to have the grizzlies’ protective status reinstated. They won in federal court late last year, and last week endangered status for the bears was reinstated.
Whereupon Liz Cheney, still fighting for the right of her constituents to slay grizzly bears, accused the litigants of “destroying our American way of life.”
Some day, not long from now, an old, frail White woman will take her grandchildren to a forest just outside Yellowstone Park. With a single tear streaming down her cheeks, she will point to the thousands of grizzly bears all around, and in a quavering voice, she will say, using the dying and almost forgotten language of her people:
“Long ago our people roamed far and wide. We knew the ways of the forest and the bears, and we nearly killed them all thanks to guns and the Great White Father in Heaven. Now, our ways are dust.”
Dangers to the Great White Civilization proliferate. Its days are numbered.
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time math professor who has experienced homelessness several times. He supplied the art for the first cover of Real Change in November of 1994 and has been involved with the organization ever since. This is his weekly column, Adventures in Irony, a dry verbal romp of the absurd. He can be reached at drwes (at) realchangenews (dot) org
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