Homeschooling, an American Divide

Wikipedia: “According to the US National Center for Education Statistics, about three percent of all children in the US were homeschooled in 2011-2012 school year. The study found that 83 percent were White, 5 percent were Black, 7 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were Asian or Pacific Islander. As of 2016, there are about 2.3 million homeschooled students in the United States…

“For most of history and in different cultures, the education of children at home by family members was a common practice. Enlisting professional tutors was an option available only to the wealthy. Homeschooling declined in the 19th and 20th centuries with the enactment of compulsory attendance laws. But, it continued to be practiced in isolated communities. Homeschooling began a resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s with educational reformists dissatisfied with industrialized education.”

In the modern era, for some, they may have a gifted child worthy of full time accelerated attention. Others are in the opposite ranks, where their children have medical issues or learning disabilities not well addressed in the public school system, even though the law seems to require proper accommodation in most states. For still others, there is the notion of familial, moral and religious values, often a focus on deeply-held beliefs often accompanied by a fear of contamination with teachings and values that the parents cannot tolerate.

While three percent might not seem like a large number, it represents millions of children who are being educated outside of mainstream public and public schools. Some prosper. Some are doomed to a lifetime outside of “the rest of the world.” And some are criminally abused with no one to report the damaging behavior. You’d think that a liberal, consumer/people protective state like California would have the answer. Apparently, and the story is the same all across the United States, California most certainly does not.

“A lack of oversight in California is what helped make the 13 children of David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin invisible to their Riverside County neighbors. The children, ages 2 to 29, were rescued in January after a 17-year-old escaped their house and called authorities. Police said when they arrived at the home, they found ropes, chains and padlocks used to restrain and shackle the Turpin siblings to their beds. They were dirty and a putrid odor permeated the house, police said. Investigators said the Turpins had imprisoned their children for years. The adult children were so malnourished they looked like children.

“These damaged children in Perris, California, were not alone. There are scores of cases like this one involving starving kids to death. Other cases document children who have been beaten by parents most of their young lives or have otherwise been treated so severely for so long they can rightly be classified as torture victims.

“In one sense, the savage abuse inflicted on the Turpin kids and in hundreds of other cases across the U.S. and in California, is easily explained by the one thing they had in common: They were homeschooled.

“In West Des Moines, Iowa, 16-year-old Natalie Finn died from starvation on Oct. 24, 2016, after her mother locked her, a 15-year-old brother and a 14-year-old sister in their bedroom for months, food and water all but cut off. One of the kids who survived, barely, later said their bedroom slowly filled with their own waste because their mother often would not let them out even to use the bathroom. When they did get permission, they were so desperately thirsty they sometimes scooped water into their mouths from the toilet bowl.

“Lax oversight of homeschooling provides a simple answer for why nobody noticed or reported little Natalie as she became little more than skin and bones. Her homeschooling ensured no teacher or other responsible adult would see the girl and detect the abuse…

“A lack of oversight in California is what helped make the 13 children of David Allen Turpin and Louise Anna Turpin invisible to their Riverside County neighbors. The children, ages 2 to 29, were rescued in January after a 17-year-old escaped their house and called authorities. Police said when they arrived at the home, they found ropes, chains and padlocks used to restrain and shackle the Turpin siblings to their beds. They were dirty and a putrid odor permeated the house, police said. Investigators said the Turpins had imprisoned their children for years. The adult children were so malnourished they looked like children.

“These damaged children in Perris, California, were not alone. There are scores of cases like this one involving starving kids to death. Other cases document children who have been beaten by parents most of their young lives or have otherwise been treated so severely for so long they can rightly be classified as torture victims.

“In one sense, the savage abuse inflicted on the Turpin kids and in hundreds of other cases across the U.S. and in California, is easily explained by the one thing they had in common: They were homeschooled.

“In West Des Moines, Iowa, 16-year-old Natalie Finn died from starvation on Oct. 24, 2016, after her mother locked her, a 15-year-old brother and a 14-year-old sister in their bedroom for months, food and water all but cut off. One of the kids who survived, barely, later said their bedroom slowly filled with their own waste because their mother often would not let them out even to use the bathroom. When they did get permission, they were so desperately thirsty they sometimes scooped water into their mouths from the toilet bowl.

“Lax oversight of homeschooling provides a simple answer for why nobody noticed or reported little Natalie as she became little more than skin and bones. Her homeschooling ensured no teacher or other responsible adult would see the girl and detect the abuse…

“From 2000 to last year, at least 320 homeschooled children were severely neglected and abused, often for years without detection, according to the Homeschooling's Invisible Children database kept by [Rachel Coleman and her Coalition for Responsible Home Education]. Of those kids, 116 died. A disproportionate number of the children were adopted from foster care and the database indicates homeschooled kids die from abuse at a great rate than other children… Nobody sees these kids.” Banning-Beaumont, CA Patch, February 18th.

Most homeschooled children do not suffer this horrendous fate. But remember that most of those that do survive will enter society at some level and interrelate and impact with the rest of society. So as much as we want parents to have the freedom to raise their children as they see fit, not only are most parents unprepared for the teaching burden, many are promulgating a belief system that just might not prepare their children to function in the real world.

For those serious at home schooling, the Internet has created teaching aids. K12.com or homeschool.com , for example, or online groups of homeschooling parents sharing resources and specialized tutors. It can be done effectively, perhaps even better than the best public or private schools.  But not always. What can and should be done?

“The Responsible Education coalition's creation of a database details in graphic language hundreds of gruesome abuse cases involving homeschooled kids… ‘Homeschooling can serve as a powerful tool in the hand of an abusive parent,’ according to the sister group that maintains the database, Homeschools Invisible Children. ‘Numerous young adults who were homeschooled for part of their upbringing and attended public school for part of their upbringing have reported that their parents' abuse was worse when they were homeschooled, as there was nothing to act as a check on their parents' abuse.’

“Among other measures the coalition has called for:

• ·         Background checks: Bar parents from homeschooling if they have committed a crime that would prevent them from teaching in a public school.
• ·         A flagging system: Bar parents from homeschooling if they or anyone in the household have previously had a founded abuse or neglect report.
• ·         Risk assessments: Conduct risk assessments when parents begin to homeschool after a recent child abuse report or concerning history of reports.
• ·         Mandatory reporter contact: Ensure that homeschooled children are seen by mandatory reporters via academic assessments, medical visits, or other means.
• ·         Medical care: Require homeschooled children to have the same medical visits required of children who attend public school.

“Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas currently forbid homeschooling of kids whose parents have been convicted of child abuse and certain other crimes. Some states require none of the coalition's proposals. No state requires all of the measures.” The Patch. We owe those children, and ourselves, a whole lot more than what is obviously provided today. For legitimate home schoolers, there should be no issues, but we should create a system of checks and balances to prevent even the slightest potential for undiscoverable child abuse.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in the perpetual balancing act between personal freedom and societal needs, sometimes a little common sense goes a long way.

The Part about Gun Control We Don’t Discuss

The news is rife with:

• bold Parkland high school students actively confronting officials, from executives from the National Rifle Association to folks like Florida Senator, Marco Rubio, who has collected over $3 million in NRA campaign contributions and who refused to renounce slorpping at the NRA trough in the future
• newscasters and celebrities joining forces and raising money/consciousness against private ownership of assault weapons
• right wing and NRA conspiracy theories on why the Florida students are unwary pawns in a liberal conspiracy to deprive freedom-loving Americans of their individual liberties
• sleight of hand shifting of NRA efforts to focus solely on mental health issues without referencing semi-automatic weapons
•  the failure of a “good guy with a gun” (an armed uniformed officer posted at the school) to defend the very students he was charged to protect 
• a Trumpian vision – which would generate new guns sales by the millions – to train and arm legions of teachers as gun-toting defenders of their students without explaining how police would know whether or not an armed teacher just might be the shooter, foisting a “more guns” approach to reduce mass shootings in our nation’s schools
• the President’s token gesture/edict to ban bumpstocks – add-ons to semi-automatic weapons to increase their effective rate of fire – given to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to supervise and implement

But now for the subtext and why, no matter what happens and no matter what token gun control legislation might accidentally pass through a GOP-controlled Congress (read: very unlikely), nothing realistically is going to reduce gun violence in the United States, at least at a federal level. What would you say if federal gun control were delegated to the National Rifle Association? You might laugh, knowing that they would – wink-wink – make sure that there would never be an enforcement effort.

So if direct delegation to the NRA would be too obvious, what would be the next best thing from the NRA perspective? How about telling the world that there is federal agency already charged with gun control (the ATF) but rather quietly making sure that that agency is profoundly understaffed and that it was so severely legally restricted in what it could and could not do that it could never mount a serious challenge even to the most egregious explosion of gun violence anywhere in the United States. Indeed, it is the ATF that is precisely that federal gun control agency, an organization that remains leaderless, underfunded and hampered by NRA-lobbied laws that insure it can never implement its chartered mandate. But because it exists, virtually anything directly or indirectly related to the notion of gun control is relegated to the ATF. And that makes NRA officials get all warm and fuzzy inside, even knowing that 70% of Americans actually support a much stricter gun control policy than anything proposed in Congress or any red state legislature.

‘‘We support enforcement of the laws on the books and A.T.F. efforts to apprehend and prosecute violent criminals,’ said Jennifer Baker, a spokeswoman for the N.R.A. ‘We have and will continue to oppose political appointees looking to enact an anti-gun agenda through the regulatory process making it more difficult for law abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional rights while criminals continue to break the law.’” New York Times, February 22nd. Wink-wink.

The modern ATF is little more than an emasculated shell of its original mandate, a very effective NRA pawn, shackled by NRA-lobbied limitations passed since 1977. Federal agencies are, for example, denied the right to spend any money to generate death-by-gun statistics, NRA-lobbied provisions… because they know what the results would show. The Dickey amendment passed by Congress in 1996 and buried in an appropriations bill, for example, precludes the Centers for Disease Control from gathering firearm death and injury statistics.

Here are more of the troubling realities that completely gut the ATF, rendering it effectively useless. “[The] A.T.F. is on the verge of a crisis. The agency, which has not grown significantly since its founding in 1973, is about to confront a staffing shortage and is set to lose its tobacco and alcohol enforcement authorities. President Trump has yet to nominate a director to oversee the agency, which has been without permanent leadership for eight of the past 12 years.

“Amid the dearth of leadership and resources, the White House is pushing the A.T.F. to the forefront of its fight against violent crime. In response to the mass shooting at a Florida high school last week, Mr. Trump, who promised to fight violent criminal gangs and illegal guns — two of the A.T.F.’s key missions — announced that he would be relying on the bureau to regulate so-called bump stock accessories.

“But it is all but politically impossible for Mr. Trump, who counts the powerful gun lobby among his most ardent supporters, to strengthen the A.T.F. The National Rifle Association has long sought to hobble the agency in an effort to curb its ability to regulate guns, which the gun lobby has traditionally opposed.

“‘Most people in law enforcement know why A.T.F. can’t get a director,’ said Michael Bouchard, a former agent and the president of the A.T.F. Association, an independent group that supports current and former bureau officials. ‘It’s not because of the people. It’s because of the politics.’…

“For decades, the N.R.A. has used its sway in Washington to preserve the A.T.F. in its limited capacity. It has aggressively lobbied against nominated directors and pushed Congress to enact restrictions on how the bureau spends money to curtail its ability to regulate firearms and track gun crimes. One funding provision, for example, forbids the A.T.F. from using electronic databases to trace guns to owners. Instead, the agency relies on a warehouse full of paper records….

“In describing its own shortages, the A.T.F. says it remains unable to fulfill even basic regulatory responsibilities, including inspections of firearms dealers — something the bureau says presents a ‘significant risk to public safety.’

“The A.T.F. is also bracing for the departure of nearly a fifth of its roughly 2,500 special agents. Of them, 499 are at least 50 years old, according to the budget proposal, and face mandatory retirement at 57.” NY Times. So how you tell America that you are doing something about the assault weapon outrage knowing that nothing will happen? You make sure all those efforts are channeled into an agency that is completely unable to implement much of anything that would challenge the current gun-ownership status quo.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the NRA appears to be more powerful than 70% of the entire American voting public.

The Myth of Rising Wages

Whenever politicians use metrics that show how much their efforts are generating success, your very next question has to be whether the relevant measurement is an average (simply taking a total, however generated, and dividing it by the number of people in the class), mean (the measurement of those right smack in the middle) or some other calculation. To show you how screwed up averages can be, let me take an extreme example (beyond the above graphic). Assume nine people earn $10,000 a year and one person earns $1 million a year. That totals up to $1,090,000, which works out to an average annual pay per worker of $109,000, a spectacular average but hardly a successful actual wage to 90% of the class of ten people.

Gross domestic product (GDP) is likewise an average number but given the extraordinary earning power of the one percenters, the actual performance in the United States is almost entirely at the top of the food chain and nowhere else. So when Donald Trump touts real hourly wage growth of 2.9% during his first year in office, that is precisely one of those misleading “averages.” It is one of those totally top-weighted toward the highest wage earners in the land.

Second, as Trump’s policies increase the price of necessities like healthcare – where his slashing of the Affordable Care Act has caused premiums for the rest of us to soar – and storms, droughts (global warming consequences) and the dearth of farmworkers who are being deported in droves as part of the Trump administration’s immigration policies are pushing up food costs at an alarming rate, and as the one percenters’ impact on the real estate market has forced housing costs to skyrocket in major cities, you also have to factor in that these new costs effectively negate whatever pay increases might exist.

For those who claim his tax cuts benefit the middle class, not only are these cuts temporary, but if you happen to live in a high personal income tax state, you just might find the new rules that severely limit state and local tax deductions in the calculation of your federal taxes might have actually significantly increased your federal taxes. And remember, the massive deficit that arises because of the huge corporate tax cut (a) carries an annual interest carry and (b) has to be paid back someday. The piper is waiting!

Here’s how the February 24th Los Angeles Times looks at these numbers: “[Wage] gains thus far have been very uneven, according to detailed Labor Department statistics. They’re concentrated at the higher end of the pay scale and the lower — well-paid executives at one end, [ordinary blue collar workers – like truck drivers – on the other].

“By and large, the broad middle of the labor force has not seen much of a raise, mirroring a long-running trend of income polarization and a shrinking middle class in America.

“Even with unemployment at a 17-year low of 4.1%, the proverbial rising tide has not lifted all boats: The fancy yachts have gotten most of the lift.

“Take the finance sector, which has led the pack in the recent wage increases... Some 8.5 million people work in banking, insurance and real estate; their average hourly pay jumped 4.2% in January from a year earlier, to just a penny under $34 an hour.

“But for ordinary nonsupervisory employees in finance — about 4 out of 5 financial-industry workers — the average increase was just 1.6%, to $26.75 an hour.

“A similar, though smaller, gap can be seen in other industries, including healthcare, retail trade, information and professional services such as computer systems designs.

“‘It’s a pulling apart at the top,’ said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-oriented group, noting that if the latest trend continues, it will exacerbate the country’s already large income inequality.

“The Republican tax overhaul that passed in December is expected to stimulate economic growth, and Trump administration officials say that will lead to broad-based wage gains as companies will have more cash to give to their workers… Many economists, however, doubt the $1.5-trillion tax overhaul will prove to be a windfall for most workers. History and recent surveys suggest that companies are more likely to use most of the tax savings to buy back shares, reward stockholders and make acquisitions.

“Stronger economic growth probably will push the jobless rate down further. Already, unemployment has fallen to a level that in the past has generated wage gains of around 3.5% to 4%... Some analysts think wage increases are on the cusp of moving up to that range again. After several years of spending a constant 3% more for salaries, U.S. companies now appear to be budgeting a little more for pay, said Sue Holloway, a director at WorldatWork, a nonprofit group that studies compensation and benefit trends.”

If you are a Trump supporter, you just might look at your little tax cut combined with the unemployment and wage growth statistics, added to a soaring stock market that mostly reflects the value of the GOP tax cut, and use that to believe that you and everyone else are vastly better off under his leadership. If you are a hard numbers person, and you drill down on the “net reality,” you will realize real, inflation-adjusted, disposable income for the vast majority of Americans has not budged in three decades.

“For the majority of workers in the U.S., the American Dream is unraveling in the face of unstable contract work, rolled-back benefits, and grueling labor conditions… and the attendant widening [income] inequities in the country… The economy has technically crawled its way out of the recession of 2008; the stock market, this year, is at an all-time high.

“While the latter point has become the favorite fodder for Donald Trump’s claims of economic stability, soaring stocks have little impact on the livelihood of most Americans. Only 18% of people own shares, and the majority of those are among the wealthiest in the country. People on the lower end of the economic spectrum–and people in the middle–rely chiefly on income for their wealth, and that situation is becoming untenable.

“The connection between having a job and making a living is quickly unraveling. In 2015, almost a quarter of working adults in the U.S. made poverty-level wages, and full-time, in-house jobs are being outsourced to contracting agencies, for whom people perform the same labor but at greatly reduced wages and often with no benefits. On top of that, the power of unions has dissolved in recent years, leaving workers with no outlet for organizing and collective bargaining, and we’re beginning to confront the fact that automation will make many low-wage jobs, like food preparation and service, obsolete.

“What has resulted from all of this is that the ‘American Dream’–the idea that any child born in the U.S. has a chance to grow up to be at least as successful, if not more so, than the generation that preceded them–is becoming more  and more like a tormenting nightmare. In the 1940s and ’50s, around 90% of American children grew up to have more financial resources and better jobs than their parents. ‘If you fast-forward to the present, a current American adult has only around a 50% chance of doing better than their parents,’ [says Lawrence Katz, Harvard professor of economics].” FastCompany.com, February 26th.

Politicians from both parties are expert at spinning statistics to suit their “successes,” but since it happens to be Trump and the GOP who are in power now, the current acceleration of income polarization, lack of any real wage growth for the vast majority of Americas for decades and the vicious costs spirals all around us have to be laid squarely in their lap. And if Americans don’t have more discretionary income, once the glory of the tax cuts fades, to justify their share price corporate America is simply going to have find a way to generate genuine top-line revenue growth or that stock market bubble economists fear will simply pop… and pop hard, probably taking real estate prices with it.

As jobs are lost to automation and artificial intelligence, likewise, the owners of the machines will make more money… but the folks whose jobs are displaced will no longer be consumers able to buy those more-efficiently-produced products and services. It’s a house of cards, waiting for a brisk wind to send the pile into hopeless disarray. So wake up and look more carefully at numbers touted by a man whose braggadocio is legendary. Understand the real from the salesmanship, and brace yourself for the ultimate consequences of playing with numbers to hide painful underlying realities. We may have to wait a year or two to see the fall… or we could be unpleasantly surprised earlier. One way or the other, that brisk wind seems to be picking up.

I’m Peter Dekom, and unless you are at the top of the economic ladder, you are probably going be slammed hard by the economic realities that politicians are trying to mask with misleading statistics.

Cruel and Unusual Punishers

In the harsh debate over gun control, one that should never remotely have given rise to the schisms that exist in American society today, there is one particularly telling undercurrent that describes American society in ways most Americans might not prefer to hear: we cherish children well below money and guns. In my February 18th Bang-ruptcy blog, I painted a rather distinct trail of money-grabbing gun manufacturers having funded the National Rifle Association’s most magnificently successful repositioning of wanton gun ownership as a basic American value above all else. Money and guns trump mass killings of anyone, especially children. They’re now selling us guns with no purpose than to kill as many people is as short a time as possible.

With the new GOP-directed Congress, headed by uber-businessman Donald Trump, conservative values – heavily focused on money and even more heavily focused on killing off programs that cost billionaires and corporation money – are the guiding light of government policy, some touching on social conservatism and others on how rich folks can make more money and spend less on being socially responsible. Like cutting healthcare. Reducing workplace safety requirements. Eliminating consumer protection. Repealing restrictions on dumping toxic waste into public waterways and the atmosphere.

They oppose abortion to save “innocents,” while championing the death penalty, sending asylum seekers back to countries where these “innocents” face almost certain incarceration, torture and even death, and favor cutting healthcare benefits that of necessity will kill millions with preventable or treatable ailments. That doesn’t count the ever-shortening life expectancy of Americans from environmental pollution or opioid addiction. Oh they talk about the horrors of opioid addiction but defund programs that just might make a difference.

In the world of “immigration reform” – words that the GOP can never implement as illustrated in my February 17th GOP-Driven Comprehensive Immigration Reform – LOL! blog – they seem to believe that to cater to that angry base that defines the contemporary Republican value system – evangelicals supporting sexual predators who espouse their values and foaming at the mouth to deploy military solutions to “show the world” who’s boss – they must escalate their embrace of cruelty as fundamental GOP politics.

As the words beneath the Statute of Liberty corrode away, as states like California that pretty much define themselves as significantly culturally Hispanic struggle against federal policies aimed at disrupting that culture, as farmers watch crops rot unharvested in their fields sending food price through the stratosphere, the feds are spending billions of dollars to purge the nation of undocumented workers. As hordes of undocumented immigrants move back home, as thousands of assault weapons bought at Southwestern U.S. gun shows cross the border into cartel hands – see my February 7th As American Guns Flow South…  blog – Donald Trump wants to spend wasteful billions on an easily penetrable border wall and hire thousands more ICE agents and border patrol officers.

For California, which does not want its cultural and ethnic values to be eviscerated, the defensive sanctuary cities and counties are countered by federal ICE officers – who claim to be focused on those with criminal records – to mount a show of force, arresting anyone without papers (by the way, do you carry citizenship papers on your person?) aimed at crushing anyone who opposes these right wing immigration policies, bringing California and other sanctuary venues to heel. Don’t hold your breath, feds; that will never happen. Mid-terms are coming and you will be able to read our political response.

Forget the unfairness inherent in our Congress’ dramatic inability even to find a simple solution to the DACA debacle. Their inability to understand that children, brought here without their choice in the matter and who have known no other nation, no other life, now defines the new American proclivity toward selfish cruelty very well. Economic studies even show us how expelling these clear-Americans will hurt all of us, but no matter, it is what our right wing wants us to become.

To send that message loud and clear, the feds are refocusing very heavily on the criminal violations inherent in undocumented immigration. To make it clear to those contemplating crossing our southern border illegally, there is another cruel practice that ICE wants all those folks south of the border to think about.

“Migrant families… are usually processed by immigration courts, an administrative process. Such families are detained together or released with notices to appear at later court proceedings. President Trump promised to end the practice, dismissing it as ‘catch and release.’

“Historically, most border crossers were sent back to their home countries, but the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute some migrant parents because entering the country illegally is a federal crime. The first offense is a misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of six months. Those caught a second time face a felony charge with a maximum sentence of up to 20 years, depending on their criminal record. Once a case becomes a criminal matter, parents and children are separated.

“According to public defenders and immigrant advocates, more and more immigrant families who come to the southern border seeking asylum are being charged in federal criminal courts from El Paso to Arizona. [Illegal border crosser] Jocelyn was charged with a misdemeanor, and her son was sent to a shelter in Chicago. Comprehensive statistics do not exist, but activists and attorneys say anecdotal evidence suggests the practice is spreading.

“‘There’s not supposed to be blanket detention of people seeking asylum, but in reality, that’s what’s happening’ in El Paso, said Dylan Corbett, director of the Hope Border Institute, a nonprofit social justice group. ‘We’re still in this limbo in our sector and across the border: What’s going on? What are the new policies?’

“Last week [mid-February], 75 congressional Democrats led by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Downey) sent a letter to the secretary of Homeland Security expressing outrage at increased family separations and demanding officials clarify their policies within two weeks… ‘We are gravely concerned that these practices are expanding and worsening, further traumatizing families and impeding access to a fair process for seeking asylum,’ they wrote…

“Last April, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions issued guidance to U.S. attorneys urging more aggressive prosecution of those illegally reentering the country. As the number of migrant families crossing illegally increased last summer, parents were detained by U.S. marshals, but their children were reclassified as unaccompanied minors and placed at shelters across the country by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

“Migrant advocates sued in federal court, arguing that when asylum seekers declare a fear of returning to their home country, federal law dictates that they be referred to an asylum officer, even if they crossed the border illegally, and their cases considered by immigration judges.

“In October, El Paso immigrant advocates asked Border Patrol officials whether they were separating migrant parents from their children… ‘They volunteered yes, we’re doing family separation,’ Corbett recalled, adding that one agent ‘said it was standard practice locally here in the sector to separate all children 10 years and older from their family. We were all shocked.’

“Afterward, Border Patrol attorney Lisa Donaldson emailed those who had attended the meeting, insisting that the ‘Border Patrol does not have a blanket policy requiring the separation of family units’ and that any increase in separations ‘is due primarily to the increase in prosecutions of immigration-related crimes.’” Los Angeles Times, February 20th. It just looks as if Border Patrol officers have such a blanket policy in place, particularly when it comes to sanctuary states. Must be a mere coincidence, then.

But even in Trumpland, people are getting a bad feeling in the pit of their stomachs over the criminalization of undocumented aliens… increasingly separating children under the guise of immigration policy. Here is one story of the Trump administration’s emphasis on “for profit” private prisons (this one focused on undocumented immigrants), institutions with generally horrific human rights abuse records in one of the reddest countries in America. “Elkhart County, Indiana, is proud of its recreational vehicles. The county—90 percent white, 41 percent factory workers, and located along the state’s northern border with Michigan—hosts RV rallies at its 4-H fairgrounds, houses an RV hall of fame, and is the heart of a region that manufactures 80 percent of the world’s RVs. It’s also a deeply conservative area, voting about 2-to-1 for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

“And yet, over the last two weeks [beginning of February], an improbable alliance of pro-immigrant activists, county officials, and RV manufacturing executives came together to defeat a local proposal that would have helped carry out Trump’s hardline deportation plans: a privately run $100 million immigration detention facility [to be owned by CoreCivic] just outside Goshen, the county seat…

“Executives of the top three employers in the area—Thor Industries, Forest River, and Lippert Components—as well as dozens of other community leaders signed on. ‘If the facility gets built, it would be harder to attract new workers and residents, which we very much need,’ the letter said. ‘CoreCivic, on the other hand, would create jobs we don’t need at wages we don’t want. Any tax dollars generated by the project wouldn’t be enough to offset the long-lasting damage such a facility would do to our county—both in terms of perception and in terms of creating an unwanted unwelcoming reputation.’” Daily Kos, February 14th.

There is nothing but shame in just about all of the federal policies enumerated above. That notion of empathy – even the very basic evangelical values of kindness, restrict for the downtrodden and a commitment to a lifetime of charity and forgiveness – seems to have evaporated in a red hat mantle of selfish cruelty, one that does not even benefit the overall prosperity and safety of the United States as a whole.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you haven’t guessed by now, I oppose these right wing immigration policies with every fiber of my being.