Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel
and Gretel. Terrified by cruel conditions at home, the brother and sister flee,
winding their way, hungry and scared, through unknown woods. There, they
encounter an old woman who lures them in with promises of safety. Instead, she
locks one of them in a cage and turns the other into a servant, as she prepares
to devour them both.
Written in nineteenth-century Germany, it should resonate eerily
in today’s America. In place of Hansel
and Gretel, we would, of course, have to focus on girls and boys by the
hundreds fleeing cruelty and hunger in Central America, believing that they
will find a better life in the United States, only to be thrown into cages by
forces far more powerful and agents much crueler than that wicked old woman. In
the story, there are no politics; there is only good and bad, right and wrong.
Rather than, as in that fairy tale, register the suffering
involved in the captivity and punishment of those children at the U.S.-Mexican border,
the administration has chosen a full-bore defense of its policies and so has
taken a giant step in a larger mission: redefining (or more precisely trying to
abolish) the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left no doubt: the reality of
those children locked in cages, deprived of the most basic needs, and brazenly
abused by the administration he works for has been an essential part of the
Trump team’s determination to abandon human rights more generally. That
willingness to leave children unprotected is part of a far larger message, not
merely an unfortunate byproduct of ill-thought out and clumsy actions by an
overwhelmed border police force.
Children in Detention Camps
The story of the children at the border is indeed gruesome. The
United States has long had migrants pushing at its southern border, often in
larger numbers than at present. In fact, since the 1980s, the numbers crossing
that border exceeded one million in 19 different years. While the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection (CBP) continues to estimate that current immigration rates are on track to exceed one
million by September, many other experts don’t think it will even happen this year.
What’s genuinely new with the current border crossings is the
number of children among the migrants. According to Acting Secretary of
Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan’s sobering recent testimony before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, the presence of such children has risen 72% in recent
years. Some even come “unaccompanied.” Others belong to migrant families.
And while last month the government officially stopped its cruel
policy of separating families, leaving many of those children (even toddlers and babies) alone in custody, Vox reports that “at any given time, for the past several weeks, more
than 2,000 children have been held in the custody of U.S. Border Patrol without
their parents.”
The conditions in the camps, strewn along the U.S. borderlands
from Arizona to Texas, are shameful and fall most harshly on those very
children. A recent Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report, issued in redacted form just days before the July 4th holiday celebrating the
birth of this country as a beacon of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,”
described the staggering squalor and danger at such confinement facilities.
There, children were often deprived of changes of clothes, beds, hot meals, toothbrushes, soap, showers, even
adequate medical attention. Other eyewitness accounts have provided graphic details on the
nature and scale of the deprivation, showing us children in soiled diapers, living with the stench of urine, sleeping on concrete floors, many weeping. On the somewhat more civilized floor of the
Senate, members were told of children sleeping outside, exposed to the elements, and of the spoiled food at the camps.
Add to this the emotional toll that family separations have
wrought on thousands of young people, as a new report issued by the House of Representatives Oversight Committee
reveals and as others have documented. An El Paso immigration lawyer visiting
one facility, for instance, described seeing a young boy who had scratched his own face until it
bled.
There are first-hand accounts by visitors to the camps of children trying to choke
themselves with the lanyards from their own identification cards and others who
dreamed about escaping by jumping out of windows high above the ground.
No wonder at least seven children have died while in such circumstances and many more
are suffering from lice, scabies, chickenpox and other afflictions. Yet when doctors
from the American Association of Pediatricians traveled to the camps to offer
their help, their services were refused. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights,
herself a pediatrician, has labeled the situation of the migrants “appalling” and noted that
“several U.N. human rights bodies have found that the detention of migrant
children may constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that is
prohibited by international law.” Others have been less circumspect, explicitly comparing the
treatment of the children to torture.
It’s hard not to assume that, however overwhelmed CBP may be, at
least some of this treatment is intentional. Why else turn away doctors
offering help or refuse supplies of donated aid sent by worried citizens? Why
arrest a humanitarian aid volunteer who gave food and water to two ill and desperate
undocumented Central American migrants and tried to get them medical help?
The administration [but not Pence] acknowledges that the overall
situation is dire, but its officials on the spot have basically thrown up their
hands, complaining that they have been “overwhelmed” by the situation they created, are “not trained to separate children,” and are powerless to address the
problem of scarce resources.
While those on the ground have claimed helplessness in the face
of the challenge, the rest of the administration refuses even to admit to the
appalling conditions. (“They are run beautifully,” said President Trump of the border facilities, blaming the
Democrats for any problems there.)
Instead, top officials have repeatedly called the disgracefully
unacceptable acceptable. Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary
Kirstjen Nielsen, who bore responsibility for creating much of the mess, assured Congress that the
children were “well taken care of,” claiming that “we have the highest standards.” Former
Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed her words. “The children,” he insisted, “are well cared
for. In fact, they get better care than a lot of American kids do.”
In court, Department of Justice lawyer Sarah Fabian refused to admit that the absence of soap, a toothbrush, a bed, and sleep
constituted unsafe and unsanitary conditions, the legal standards applying to
the detention of migrant children.
The U.S. Border Patrol chief for the El Paso region
callously remarked, “Twenty years ago, we were lucky if we had juice and crackers
for those in custody. Now, our stations are looking more like Walmarts, with
diapers and baby formula and all kinds of things, like food and snacks."
Vice President Mike Pence highlighted the refusal to acknowledge
reality recently by calling the two camps he visited, neither solely for children, but
one housing families, examples of “compassionate care... care that every
American would be proud of.”
Really? In whose world are filth,
disease, and persistent emotional cruelty acceptable? In what America is the
brutal incarceration of children not a violation of founding principles? In
what America is rejecting the advances in protections that have been a hallmark
of U.S. and international policy since the Second World War standard operating
procedure? Since when do American officials just throw up their hands and
declare defeat (as a kind of victory of cruelty) rather than muster their best
talents, energies, and resources to confront such a problem?
The answer, of course, is in Donald Trump’s America. And don’t
for a moment think that this is just a matter of the piling up of unintended
consequences. It’s not.
A Declaration of Inhuman Rights
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered some insights into the
mindset of such an administration when it comes to the country’s longstanding
embrace of the very idea of human rights. Soon after July 4th, he announced the creation of a new Commission on Unalienable Rights at
the State Department. Its purpose, he claimed, was to rethink the spread of human rights protections as a part of
American foreign policy.
The very idea of rights, Pompeo insisted, had spun out of
control. “Human-rights advocacy has lost its bearings and become more of an
industry than a moral compass,” he said, wagging his finger at 70 years of history. “‘Rights talk’ has
become a constant element of our domestic political discourse, without any
serious effort to distinguish what rights mean and where they come from.”
Rather than expand rights further, he explained, the country
would do well to return to (his idea of) the context of the founding fathers
and explore just what they really meant in their classic writings.
Essential to his goal, experts suggested, was rolling back abortion rights. A remarkable number of the
commission members were, in fact, known for their anti-abortion positions and this should have
surprised no one, since the State Department had already withdrawn all health assistance from international organizations that offer abortion
counseling and care.
In doing so, it expanded what, in prior Republican administrations, were more modest restrictions
on abortion-related care. Striking as such a global anti-abortion-rights
position might be, however, Pompeo’s urge seems far grander. His goal is
evidently to unilaterally reject the evolution of human rights that has
prominently defined the country since the post-World War Two era, and that has
been an essential piece of American democratic rhetoric since its founding.
To begin the process, Pompeo promptly misappropriated the very
language of the Declaration of Independence to promote an agenda explicitly
calling for the removal of rights. “My hope,” he announced, “is that the Commission on Unalienable Rights will ground our
understanding of human rights in a manner that will both inform and better
protect essential freedoms -- and underscore how central these ideas are not
only to Americans, but to all of humanity.”
As the rest of his comments showed, he was invoking the freedom
to deprive others, exclude others, and cause hardship for others. Placed
alongside the border realities, it was a testament to the administration’s
determination to erase rights from the nation’s identity. Putting a fine point
on his goals, Pompeo added that, in his view, human rights and democracy were
distinctly in opposition to each other. As he pungently put it, “Loose talk of
‘rights’ unmoors us from the principles of liberal democracy.”
Pompeo’s attempt to recast the founders’ intent in the context
of today's cruelty may be the most full-throated
articulation to date of what this administration has been up to. The ongoing
mistreatment of children at the border, a story that has lasted for well over a
year, suggests that the spirit of Pompeo’s Declaration of Inhuman Rights has
long been on the agenda.
He had one thing right, however: those border camps do seem to
belong to another place and time, one that preceded the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, another document he invoked, intending to reshape American
adherence to it.
The New Status Quo
This is hardly the first time the Trump administration has
revealed its cynicism over democracy. Redefining the very purpose of “liberal
democracy,” as I wrote more than a year ago, had been part of its mission since
the beginning. In its first 18 months, the administration removed the language
of democracy from the mission statements of many of its departments, including
the phrase “nation of immigrants” from that of the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services. Still, after two and a half years of reorienting the
executive branch of government away from equal protection under the law, the
equal right to vote, and a respect for the very idea of welcoming immigrants,
Pompeo’s “commission” may be the most brazen conceptual act yet when it comes
to erasing the language of human rights from the country’s identity.
It’s in this still-developing context that the migrant children
crisis should be understood. It should be seen as a graphic version of the
insistence of this administration on changing the very meaning of “life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the modern age.
For Pompeo (as for his president), the evolution of the country
towards more rights for more people is nothing but a mark of shame. How far
back would he take us? To before the Civil War?
No wonder, on learning each day’s news from the border, it’s
easy to feel we’ve entered a dismal fairy tale from an age of ogres and
witches, where the forces of evil and ill will have taken charge and the
prospect of saving helpless children seems as irretrievably long gone as those
crumbs eaten by the birds following Hansel and Gretel on their grim journey
into the witch’s lair.
Attacking the most vulnerable among us -- infants, toddlers,
young children, teens -- leaves little room for doubt. This administration is
determined to undo the country’s commitment to human rights and so change its
identity in a way that should concern us all.
Karen J. Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at
Fordham Law and editor-in-chief of the
CNS Soufan Group Morning Brief. She is the author and editor of many books, among them Rogue Justice: The Making of the
Security State and The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s
First 100 Days. Julia Tedesco, Jonathan
Ellison, and Andrew Steffan helped with research for this article.
Copyright 2019 Karen J. Greenberg. First published in TomDispatch. Included in Vox Populi with
permission.
