Refugees and Sanctuary – Sofi’s Choice


 

One tragic aspect within a tragic era within the history of a great country is now being tragically repeated.

And it is deliberate.

It was 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes had just become President. He did not get the most votes. He made deals with corrupt politicians. He got a special committee to award him electoral votes that should have gone to his opponent.

Part of the deal was to end federal protection for newly freed slaves.
Lynching resumed right after.

The June Issue of the Atlantic Monthly that year contained an article by an author identified only as A South Carolinian.

My principles now lead me to abhor slavery and rejoice at its abolition. Yet sometimes, in the midst of the heat and toil of the struggle for existence, the thought involuntarily steals over me that we have seen better days.

The article chronicled a few enthusiasms of the newly freed slaves, including an apparent passion for travel.

They are literally crazy about traveling.

The author thought it was, well, kind of cute.

… it is delightful to witness their childish wonder and enjoyment and behavior…

For many decades, scholars accepted such views at face value.

Modern historians like Eric Foner pretty much turned that around, digging past, going to census data, contemporary documentation, and first person accounts.

In September 1865, northern reporter John Dennett encountered a freedman who had walked more than six hundred miles from Georgia to North Carolina, searching for his wife and children from whom he had been separated by sale. Another freedman, writing from Texas, asked the aid of the Freedman’s Bureau in locating “my own dearest relatives,” providing a long list of sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles, and in-laws, none of whom he had seen since his slave in Virginia twenty-four years before.

It is a largely neglected aspect of slavery, one that was inadequately presented in the secondary education of my long ago youth.

Vladimir Duthiers of CBS News tells of his own research:

I did a piece for the CBS evening news where families who had been ripped apart during slavery, once abolition happened – the emancipation, they put ads in newspapers, called Information Wanted ads where they were searching for either their children or their parents, and the mental scars that these individuals suffered throughout the rest of their lives, being separated from their families, were never ever healed.

Historian Kenneth Davis adds this:

…most sociologists will tell you that that was the greatest tragedy of slavery: the destruction of the African American family.

If perfection is what makes a country great, we have a way to go. But we can apply a more merciful self-judgment. If we do not measure up to our own standards, we can measure upward. We can say that we will never again repeat the worst practices of our past.

Our current government chooses a different direction.

The Trump practice of separating immigrant families was initially presented as a mere extension of Obama policies. And the Obama administration did indeed separate children from adults to whom they were not related. It was temporary and for their own safety, until it could be determined the adult was a legitimate guardian.

President Trump, for a few television moments, claimed to be ending the practice.

You have to understand, we’re keeping families together but we have to keep our borders strong.

And, with great fanfare, he did sign an executive order. He signed it in the presence of cameras and bright lights.

That was then. Now, Trump lawyers are telling courts they not only have the right to keep children apart, but they do not have any obligation to provide them even minimal sanitary necessities.

Safe and sanitary is a singular category in the agreement. And one has to assume left that way, and not innumerated by the parties, because either the parties couldn’t reach agreement on how to innumerate that or that it was left to the agencies to determine…

They are sometimes interrupted by impatient judges:

OR it was relatively obvious. And at least obvious enough so that if you’re putting people into a crowded room, to sleep on a concrete floor, with an aluminum foil blanket on top of them, that doesn’t comply with the agreement.

To those of us capable of even minimal skepticism, it does appear that the conditions are not a result of accident or even negligence.

Refugees have the legal right to apply for asylum. Those who claim refugee status have the legal right to a legal hearing to see if they qualify. At border crossings, the process is slowing to a crawl. Agents are being withdrawn. Only a few hearings are now allowed. Refugees are told to wait outside on roads and bridges, for weeks, sometimes months.

Laws are being broken, but not by those whose rights are now being violated. The most desperate try to cross outside the barriers, where they search for agents to whom they can surrender. They are harshly criticized by conservatives for breaking the rules.

Until recently, our government allowed only 45,000 refugees to enter the United States each year. That hardly seems adequate for a relatively wealthy country of over 325 million.

The Trump administration reduced that number from 45,000 to 30,000. They are now floating the idea of reducing that number from 30,000 to zero.

That would be none.

It begins to appear that the strategy of family separation is deliberate. It is a calculated cruelty meant to reduce refugees to that magic number: zero. The intent is to make immigration conditions more harsh, less tolerable, than the deadly circumstances from which refugees flee.

National Public Radio interviewed a family in El Paso Texas. A young woman had seen her own mother murdered by a local gang. Her sister had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered because she was a witness. Now the gangs were coming for her. Her daughter had recently had surgery following a heart attack. The family fled.

In El Paso, government agents ordered them to go back. A doctor intervened. The little girl was a heart attack victim, a candidate for sudden death. The agents would be violating the law if they sent her back.

They relented. The told the little 3-year old to choose which of her parents they would send back, and which they would allow to stay. Even the child’s name was a stark coincidence. Her name is Sofia. Her family calls her Sofi.

It was a scene from Sophie’s Choice, the impossible decision, except it was to be made by a small child. And it was against the law.

The doctor was joined by a Congressional Representative and, at the last minute, the separation was overturned.

This is what our country has come to.


– Podcasts –