America’s Night of Broken Glass
Kristallnacht also referred to as “the Night of Broken Glass” was a violent attack against Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by Hitler’s SA paramilitary forces and German civilians.
The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.
Earlier this summer, Dana Sabraw, a federal judge in San Diego, ordered the Trump Administration to reunite more than twenty-five hundred migrant children with their parents, from whom they had been forcibly separated at the border. Now, a month and a half after the last of those deadlines has passed, more than four hundred children remain separated from their parents.
A record number of immigrant children are in US custody. According to the official with knowledge, the daily discharge rate for unaccompanied immigrant children is down to 0.6 per hundred, from 2.0 per hundred in 2017. With a population of 12,800 children, over a 30-day month that would translate to only 2,304 released, vs. 7,680 at the old rate. That means more than 5,000 more children kept in custody per month.
Likewise, the average length of stay in custody is rapidly climbing. According to annual reports to Congress, in fiscal year 2016, the average length of stay had been brought down to 35 days by the Obama administration.
The average in 2017 went up to 48 days. Today, that average is up to 59 days, according to HHS spokesman Kenneth Wolfe. And that counts only children who have already left, experts point out, making it impossible to know how long some kids have been waiting.
There are indications that the Trump administration may also be slowing kids’ release in quieter ways.
- In June, a federal judge blocked current program Director Scott Lloyd from continuing to require his personal sign-off on the release of a child from a secure facility, calling it “the zenith of impermissible agency action” and an “unconscionable delay” for kids.
- “Vulnerable (immigrant children) cannot and should not be held hostage to an administration’s flight of whimsy,” wrote District Judge Paul A. Crotty.
- Last month, another federal judge granted class action status and let proceed a lawsuit that alleges the administration was improperly keeping teens in custody until they turned 18 so they could be transferred to more restrictive, adult detention.
This treatment of children by Trump gangsters is nothing more than America’s night of broken glass. Just like the behavior of Nazi gangsters in 1938, the behavior of trump’s gangsters in 2018 is a harbinger of cruelty yet to come. The Night of broken glass was a harbinger of secret police, concentration camps and gas chambers. There’s no reason to believe the separation of children from their parents and jailing of them thousands of miles away is any different.
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Notes:
1 https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/14/politics/immigrant-children-kept-detention/index.html
Originally published at neutec.wordpress.com on September 14, 2018.
