It looks like the selective outrage mob came out in full force and flooded the letters section of our little ole Lewis County newspaper of record, The Chronicle. We were blessed with selective outrage from Vancouver, Washington, and as far away as Arizona.
The selective outrage mob writers, coincidentally, all used the same media-driven buzzwords; “internment camps,” “undocumented immigrants” or just “immigrants,” “neighbors,” “friends,” “ripping” children from the arms of their parents, “fascist” regimes, kids in “cages,” etc.
The policy of separating illegal immigrant children from their law-breaking, illegal immigrant parents has been in effect since 1997, and I wonder where the selective outrage mob was in 2012-16 when Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) and accompanied children slept under space blankets, behind cyclone fence enclosures? The problem that we are seeing at our southern border didn’t just miraculously appear in 2018.
The 1997 Flores vs. Reno case set the national standards for the treatment and placement of both accompanied and unaccompanied illegal immigrant children.
The standard set was that an illegal immigrant child could not be held for more than 20 days by the government. The handling of Illegal Immigrant minors is now the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, specifically the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement.
From 2003 through 2011, the ORR was supervising roughly 8,000 children per year. In 2013 accompanied/unaccompanied illegal immigrant children spiked to 57,000 and then to 59,000 in 2016. Word spread throughout Central America that if you crossed the border illegally, uttered the magic words “fear of persecution back home” and if you had your, or someone else’s, child with you, the chances of being released into the U.S. in 20 days during those years was far higher than waiting for months, in detention, for your asylum claim to be adjudicated.
There is an ugly side to our open borders problem that our corrupt media and politicians don’t want the average citizen to know. Over 80 percent of the minors being held now came unaccompanied. Thousands of “loving,” “caring” parents in Central America are sending minor children on a dangerous trek, riding on top of train cars, at the mercy of a Mexican coyotes (human traffickers), most of whom are drug cartel aligned.
Young girls are being sent alone, with birth control, because the parents know that over 80 percent of women/young girls are being raped during this dangerous journey. Young children and adults have been left to die in the desert or stacked into extremely hot containers. How many aren’t making it?
Every Illegal immigrant caught at the border has to be processed by the capturing border agent. This takes the agent off the border. Meanwhile, across the border, the drug cartels have lookouts, looking for these weak areas. And then the real problem crosses: black tar heroin.
Human trafficking is big business on both sides of the border, and those profiting from it here in the U.S. would stun the average citizen. But that’s another letter.
Theodore Even
Chehalis
