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So this thread happened a year ago yesterday.
I remember writing it after listening to leaked audio of children crying in detention camps, and the workers trying to console them, then breaking down in tears as my own child slept nearby.
20 million views later, some thoughts:
I remember writing it after listening to leaked audio of children crying in detention camps, and the workers trying to console them, then breaking down in tears as my own child slept nearby.
20 million views later, some thoughts:
1. We’re still trying to do the thing I was talking about: deterring desperate migrants through harsh, inhumane, and immoral detention conditions. The numbers of people imprisoned have skyrocketed in the past year, with no end in sight. The goal remains the same: Deterrence.
2. Most of the people who spread this think it’s me dunking on Obama or owning the libs. It’s not. The message, which I might have delivered more clearly, is non-partisan.
Deterring migrants through cruelty, imprisonment, and death is America’s official border security policy.
Deterring migrants through cruelty, imprisonment, and death is America’s official border security policy.
3. Like all policy choices, deterrence has consequences. Reopening family internment camps — an Obama-era response to Central American migration — allowed for their use and weaponization during the present regime.
And like all policy choices, deterrence can be replaced.
And like all policy choices, deterrence can be replaced.
4. The horrors of family separation, and the bipartisan national uprising against it, proved more than the regime was willing to endure. It ended (sort of) because everyday people showed up. Here’s what that looked like at a @fams2gether rally in #Nashville.
5. I honestly don’t know how many of the 20m views of this thread resulted in anyone actually changing their mind or reconsidering what it means when we say “secure the border” or “they have to come the right way”. My sense is the number’s not high, based on the comments.
6. But for the folks capable of being persuaded, or of putting yourselves in others’ shoes, I’d humbly suggest that the current status quo—over 80k men, women, and kids imprisoned by ICE, CBP, and ORR (and rising)—is absolutely just as horrible as what we rose up against last yr.
7. Without mass resistance, this will become the New Normal, imprisonment of migrants will increase, and the surveillance and criminalization of those who try to keep them from dying, people like @NoMoreDeaths @AlOtroLado_Org and others, is going to increase as well.
8/8. If we’re actually better than this, it’s time for us to show it. Homestead should not exist. Ft. Sill should not house immigrant children. Tent camps in Texas and Mexico should be closed. And, if only because it’s the law, DHS must stop overrunning it’s detention budget.
